Tax-news.com reports that the Irish Taxation Institute is urging united opposition to the European Commission scheme to create a harmonized corporate tax base.
Some in the business community mistakenly think a harmonized corporate base would mean lower compliance costs because they could file one tax return for all EU nations, but this naive view fails to recognize that curtailing tax competition will make it easier for politicians to increase the overall tax burden:
The Irish Taxation Institute (ITI) has called for political, business and representative groups to unite against moves to harmonise European taxes. ITI made the call on a day when the German Presidency of the EU hosted a meeting in Berlin on the subject of the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base or CCCTB.
Commenting on the issue, Mark Redmond, CEO of the ITI said moves towards a common means of paying corporate taxes in the EU is bad for Ireland and bad for Europe. “The more you harmonise taxes, the more tax rates will rise, the more compliance costs will rise and the more unemployment will rise. The proposals put forward to date remain vague. They fail to come clean on the burden they will bring on both domestic and international businesses and they fail to address the widely held belief that it will mean higher corporate tax rates by the backdoor,” he warned.
