By Ed Conway, Economics Editor
The OECD has raised the prospect of a global tax war, with companies caught having to pay double the levels of previous years, unless countries agree to a new international deal on corporate tax avoidance.
In a landmark report, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has warned that the international agreements set up in the 1920s to prevent companies paying double the tax on their profits in different countries could be abandoned, leaving "chaos" in their wake.
The warning came as it presented a 15-point action plan aimed at tackling tax avoidance by multinational companies such as Google and Starbucks.
It said that many companies - particularly those involved in the digital and internet sectors - were able to reduce their tax bills by shifting profits around the world to areas where rates are lowest, taking advantage of 90-year old rules aimed at preventing them being charged tax twice in different countries.
The perverse upshot of these League of Nation "double taxation" rules, it pointed out, was "double non-taxation".
However, it warned that unless Governments agreed an international scheme to police this, countries were likely to throw away the existing rules, resulting in "the replacement of the current consensus-based framework by unilateral measures, which could lead to global tax chaos marked by the massive re-emergence of double taxation".
The report added: "In fact, if the Action Plan fails to develop effective solutions in a timely manner, some countries may be persuaded to take unilateral action for protecting their tax base, resulting in avoidable uncertainty and unrelieved double taxation."
The report was delivered as finance ministers from the G20 group of nations met in Moscow for their annual meeting.
The OECD's hope is that the action plan is adopted either at this conference or at the heads-of-state meeting in St Petersburg next month.
However, some countries, including Russia and the United States, have expressed concern about the consequences of rewriting international corporate tax agreements that have been in place for almost a century.
The OECD plan suggests an investigation into measuring the creation of value in internet firms (in order to identify where taxes ought to be paid), as well as proposals to tackle complex structures which help companies avoid tax.
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