Strasbourg, 11/05/2016 (Agence Europe) - In a report published on Wednesday 11 May, the OECD tempered the conclusions of the Greens/EFA Group at the European Parliament suggesting that the United States is a major tax haven.
“It is true that there are transparency issues in the United States. For instance, they have not undertaken to apply the common reporting standard. There are also problems regarding single-person limited companies owned by foreign associates”, Pascal Saint-Amans, Director of the OECD's Tax Policy and Administration Centre, told EUROPE. The two key points referred to by Saint-Amans are no other than the ones highlighted by the Greens/EFA in their report.
However, Saint-Amans took pains to pour oil on troubled waters. “The US applies the exchange [of information] by request on a massive scale, as it does with automatic exchange, albeit to a limited extent. Generally, you would have to be fairly incautious to choose the US is a place to hide”. He went on to explain that the so-called 'Delaware Loophole' will be closed by regulatory means before the presidential elections in November of this year. The report by the Greens/EFA explains that this federal state allows companies to create holdings which the parent and other subsidiaries pay for intellectual property rights. This income is not taxed in Delaware and its payment is tax-deductible for the parent company in its federal state of residence.
Among the recommendations made by the Greens/EFA Group, there is the suggestion that the EU create a withholding tax for all payments from the EU financial institutions which are not in compliance, as the United States has done in the framework of its bilateral agreements on the exchange of data on financial accounts (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA).
The European Greens are also calling on the EU to screen the United States on the basis of criteria to be developed to define a European blacklist of tax havens and seriously to consider the possibility of putting the US on that list. There is no way that any member state will agree to this, a Council of the EU source responded. (Original version in French by Elodie Lamer)