After recent tax scandals surrounding Amazon, Starbucks and eBay’s UK tax contributions, George Osborne and the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, have agreed to announce a crackdown on tax avoidance by big multinationals.
Although neither minister named and shamed individual companies, government sources have said the growth of e-commerce and the difficulty of international corporate tax rules have enabled multinationals to avoid legitimate taxation by shifting their profits around the globe.
Osborne has stated that he an Schäuble have called for ‘concerted international co-operation to strengthen international tax standards that at the minute may mean international companies can pay less tax than they would otherwise owe’.
Read more or find out the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion.