2024-10-03 12:27:11
The European Commission followed through on its threat. It ended up taking Spain – and three other member states – to the European Union courts for not having applied the minimum corporate rate of 15% for multinationals and large business groups. The Union approved a directive in December 2022 which had to be transposed into the various national legislations by 1 January this year. Spain, like Cyprus, Portugal and Poland, in all this time “did not communicate” to the Community Executive that they had already applied the regulatory changes, so Brussels started a sanctioning procedure that ended up in court. The law is now in the Congress of Deputies waiting to receive the green light, and sources in the Ministry of Finance indicate that it will be approved by the end of the year.
An agreement, sponsored by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), was reached in late 2021 between more than 140 countries to set a minimum effective corporate tax rate and seek to limit the effects of competition tax rate fell and large companies shifted their profits to tax havens and jurisdictions with lax taxation. The same club of industrialized countries then calculated that with this movement an additional 220 billion dollars (about 200 billion euros) could be raised throughout the world. Shortly thereafter, the European Union developed a directive that was approved despite resistance from several member states, such as Ireland, Poland and Hungary.
Once the directive has been approved at community level, it is up to each member state to transpose it into their national legislation, and Spain is lagging behind. Political instability, with last year’s repeat election and the difficult parliamentary arithmetic it led to, is delaying the activity. In December the coalition government approved the bill necessary for the regulation to come into force, but the delay in bringing forward the approval of the regulation provoked a reaction from Brussels, which had already issued a warning to the countries last March not adherents. compliant parties, including Spain, through a reasoned opinion.
“All EU member states had to put in place the necessary laws to comply with the Pillar 2 Directive. [como se conoce técnicamente al tipo mínimo del 15%] by 31 December 2023. To date, most EU Member States have fulfilled these obligations. However, Spain, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Portugal have not yet notified their national implementing measures. Therefore, the Commission has decided to send a reasoned opinion to these Member States who now have two months to respond and take the necessary measures. Otherwise, the Commission could decide to refer the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union”, warns the Community Executive in the document.
national tax
Spain has already implemented on its own, in 2022, a minimum tax of 15% for large companies. This, however, is different from that promoted by the international community, as it is applied on a different scale. The Spanish figure is calculated on the tax base, which is determined after applying various adjustments to corporate profits and is the amount from which the payment of corporate tax is defined. The formula agreed by the European Commission, however, refers to the adjusted accounting result, an indicator closer to profits.
This EU minimum rate is intended to function as a tax base affecting only the largest multinational and national groups, those with a consolidated income of €750 million or more and with a parent company or branch in a Member State of the European Union. ‘EU.
The directive provides that this “complementary” tax is based on two interconnected rules: that of including income and that of insufficiently taxing profits. The first, which will work by default, means that the parent company of a group resident in Spain must calculate and pay a supplementary commission on what it obtains in countries with tax levels below 15%; The second mechanism implies a subsequent reallocation and would be applied only if the first was insufficient.
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