We have submitted comments to the UN Tax Committee’s consultation on a discussion draft to revise the Royalties article to clarify its application to software. Unfortunately, in our view the draft is seriously defective, since it is based on and would perpetuate a confused and misleading understanding of copyright introduced in 1992 in the OECD Commentary. This interpretation was rejected by many states, many of which have chosen to clarify their actual treaties by including a specific mention of computer programs as examples of copyright work. This draft proposes a different approach which could have retroactive effects on these treaties and deprive many states of taxing rights. We urge the Committee to adopt instead a simple clarification of the model based on these existing treaties. To contribute to a rapid conclusion of this work we provide a draft for five paragraphs of Commentary to accomplish this task.
Read MoreWe republish here an article written by several BMG members, together with other colleagues, first published in Tax Notes International on 15 February 2021.
The article explains and analyses our suggested revised version of the OECD’s proposed global anti-base erosion tax (the GLOBE), a minimum effective tax rate for multinationals (the METR). This presents in more detail the proposal first made in our comments of December 2019 on the Pillar Two proposals.
Our METR is a more equitable, far less complex, and more practical variant on the GLOBE, and could be introduced by a coalition of willing states.
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