Renew Europe urges the European Council to endorse a resolute leadership role for the EU towards fairer taxation by taking swift and determined steps towards introducing a digital levy as an own resource of the EU Budget in the course of 2021. The current deadlock of the international negotiations on digital taxation must be overcome by taking the lead in the creation of a fairer tax system.
Valérie HAYER (Renaissance, France), parliamentary rapporteur for BUDG, said: “The European Council summit on 25 and 26 March will discuss the EU digital levy. The Member States must respect the legally binding Interinstitutional Agreement concluded last December that determined that the next step regarding the EU digital levy must be a Commission proposal in June 2021.”
Taxing the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) and others big digital platforms and adapting our tax systems to the digital economy has become a political emergency. Our fellow citizens no longer accept the unfairness of the current situation, nor our SMEs, which are taxed at a relative level much higher than the stars of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, while suffering from their dominant position in the markets.
The need to introduce an EU digital levy now arises all the more acutely since the EU has decided to find new sources of income for the EU budget to repay the common borrowing taken for the European Recovery Plan. Improving tax fairness and funding the EU budget by taxing digital giants is the recommendation of a report of Ms Hayer adopted today in the Committee on Budgets (BUDG) which fuels the Committee on Economic Affairs (ECON) on the subject.
The OECD has been conducting negotiations on the taxation of digital giants since 2015. Paralyzed in the Trump era, they have just resumed with some goodwill on the part of the Biden administration. But time is running out. A European solution becomes imperative, irrespective of the desirable developments at the OECD level.
For more information, please contact
Laude Yannick
Tel : +32 2 284 31 69
Mob : +32 495 22 78 37
Email : yannick.laude@europarl.europa.eu
