The EU may soon introduce a “Tech Tax” bill
The EU may soon introduce a “Tech Tax” bill
For a long time, Amazon has been famous for funnelling their profits through Luxemburg to minimise taxation and Apple are still fighting an EU commission, and Apple is continuing to challenge an EU ruling that will force them to pay $13 billion in tax in Ireland. The main problem here is that the tax money is rarely going to the country where their goods, services or products are sold, effectively conning governments across the world from tax money.
This problem is set to be solved by an EU “Tech Tax”, which does not tax a company’s products but their revenue in the nations where their products are sold. In an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD), France’s Minister of the Economy has stated that the EU is close to announcing legislation that would introduce a “Tech Tax” of 2-6%, though this value is set to be at the lower end of this scale. This tax will be on a company’s revenue within each state that they operate in, making the tax easy to calculate and harder to avoid. Even so, this tax will be much lower than the corporation tax that tech giants are frequently accused of dodging.
Right now this new tax is rumoured to be announced within the coming weeks, though it is likely that this ruling will be challenged by affected companies, who will insist that their current practices are legal.
This legislation will allow countries to gain more tax money from corporations like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, making their tax dodging practices less effective. Note that this tax is not on hardware/tech itself, which means that consumers will not be footing the bill here, at least directly.
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