Measuring tax avoidance: What data for BEPS 11?

Update 13/5/15: OECD has released all the public comments on BEPS 11. See end for encouraging business support for use of country-by-country reporting data…

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Don’t look now, but the OECD may just have realised that public country-by-country reporting is necessary to meet their Base Erosion and Profit Shifting commitments… 

The OECD has a mandate from the G8 and G20 to measure and track the extent to which the profits of multinational enterprises (MNEs) are ‘misaligned’ with the location of their real economic activity – Action Point 11, out of 15, of the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting initiative, or BEPS 11 if you will.

Why this is exciting – no, really

Now BEPS 11 is not only the top action point for geeks. It may also be the most important overall. Other BEPS measures can change the dynamic in a particular part of the problem of applying international tax rules. Some of those changes will reduce avoidance over the medium-term. And some may even benefit lower-income countries outside of the OECD, to some extent at least.

But BEPS 11 could change the whole landscape in which tax rules are applied. BEPS can, and should, deliver public data, on an annual basis, which shows the following:

• The current degree of profit misalignment globally (which the whole BEPS initiative is aimed at reducing);
• Trends over time, i.e. how well the BEPS initiative is performing on its sole aim; and
• Regional and national BEPS patterns, i.e. which countries receive disproportionately large or small shares of the MNE tax base – and how this is changing over time.

This is Uncounted‘s type of data – not transparency for its own sake, but transparency that shifts the balance of power. In this case, OECD country tax authorities can, and quite often do, demand sufficient data to see their piece of the story.

The biggest shifts in power if this data was made available would be (i) from MNEs to tax authorities in lower-income countries, that have not hitherto been able to make such demands; and (ii) towards civil society, who have not to this point been able to hold MNEs or tax authorities fully responsible, because of a lack of public information.

Additional benefits would be for all tax authorities (and national civil society) to compare their own performance with others globally; and for MNEs to do the same.

Where are we now?

The new OECD discussion draft on BEPS 11 covers a lot of ground. It surveys the academic literature (as reviewed here), including kind treatment of some of our work. It sets out some potential BEPS indicators. In both cases, the results are somewhat hamstrung by currently available data.

The most exciting discussion is of course on the data itself. And as the response of the BEPS Monitoring Group (to which I contributed) shows, the OECD document really has only one logical conclusion: country-by-country reporting data offers the only serious prospect of creating a baseline on the extent of BEPS, and of tracking it consistently over time. 

These are the key points from the BEPS Monitoring Group response – well worth reading in full:

Thorough, timely or comprehensive analysis of BEPS is currently not possible due to data limitations. The discussion draft provides a very useful discussion of data sources and methodologies and rightly concludes that availability of comprehensive and reliable micro data is a major constraint. Additional disclosure requirements for MNEs are crucial to ensure that such data become available. The same applies to bilateral macro data; these require primarily an effort by governments to collect and report better statistics.

Enhancing possibilities for analysis of BEPS requires revisiting the implementation of country-by-country reporting requirements under Action 13. We understand that the OECD is committed to ensure that the final set of BEPS Actions, to be presented towards the end of the year, will be a coherent package. There is an urgent need to enhance coherence between Action 13 and Action 11 in the final package. We discuss this in more detail below.

Now there is a possible halfway house. If policymakers are committed to progress against BEPS, but for whatever lobbying reason cannot accept public country-by-country reporting, then this is the get-out.

In our previous submission we already mentioned second-best alternatives, such as storing all country-by-country reporting data in a secured central data system. Staff from the OECD CTPA, IMF FAD, UN Tax Committee, regional tax forums and external researchers could then have full access to all micro data, bound by confidentiality agreements, and be able to publish partially aggregated statistics. It is worrying that the February 2015 guidance on implementation does not even provide for second-best approaches to make the data available to researchers. If some countries continue to block the OECD and G20 from endorsing public country-by-country reporting, the OECD should urgently work on a second-best approach.

Absent immediate agreement on public CbC, there must be – at a minimum – some process in place to collate all the data, to analyse it, and to publish results of that analysis along with partially aggregated statistics to allow further analysis by others. (There’s some discussion of the likely very high benefit-cost ratio involved, in my Copenhagen Consensus piece on post-2015.)

Otherwise we’d be accepting the failure of BEPS 11 – and with it the failure to demonstrate any progress of the whole BEPS initiative. Not to mention that all the CbC compliance costs still be incurred, while we leave all sorts of potential benefits on the table.

Watch this space

So it’s very welcome indeed to see the OECD draft appear to point to the inescapable logic of using CbC data.

But it’s also noticeable that they stop short of an explicit demand of this type. So we may assume the politics remain tricky, even if the logic is clear.

Watch this space.

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Update 13/05/15: the public comments on BEPS 11 have been published. Many, including from business, raise interesting questions about specific possible BEPS indicators – a subject to which further attention will be given, not least when some new work on misalignment is ready in a month or two. 

For now, note this interesting feature of the comments: there is broad business support, where data availability is addressed, for the use of country-by-country reporting data to monitor BEPS. This includes:

British business group, the CBI:

These documents should provide tax authorities with significantly more information that they currently possess and therefore we would suggest that analysis is also carried out on the new information that tax authorities will have to monitor BEPS before any additional burden is created for business under this Action.

Big 4 accountants EY: 

The country-by-country report will require that MNEs gather information of a type and in a manner that it are not required for any other accounting or tax purpose.  The master file/local file framework for transfer pricing documentation will require extensive quantitative and qualitative information about the MNE group and about the individual entities in the group.  We would urge that the OECD look first to the data that will be collected through this new information reporting before considering any new reporting requirements.

TD Bank sum up the general view, which seems to be that CbC data should be used for BEPS rather than imposing any additional compliance requirements:

‘Moreover, the compliance burden on multinational corporations will increase significantly with the new country-by-country reporting and master file transfer pricing documentation contemplated under BEPS Action 13.  We do not believe further additions to the reporting requirements for corporate taxpayers should be the answer.  Rather, we believe it is important for tax authorities to work together to share the information that already is provided and, as the Discussion Draft notes, to use the available data more effectively.  One key use of the available data is to better measure the incidence of BEPS.