France orders tech giants to pay digital tax



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France’s finance ministry has sent notices to large tech companies subject to its digital services tax to pay the tax as scheduled in December, the ministry said on Wednesday.

France suspended collection of the tax, which will hit companies like Facebook and Amazon, earlier this year as negotiations were underway at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development over an overhaul of international tax rules.

The finance ministry has long said it will collect the tax in December as planned if the talks prove unsuccessful by then, which happened when the nearly 140 countries involved agreed last month to continue. negotiations until mid-2021.

“Companies subject to the tax have received their notice of payment of the 2020 deposit,” said an official from the finance ministry.

Last year, France applied a 3% levy on digital service revenues made in France by companies with revenues over 25 million euros here and 750 million euros worldwide .

The ministry had hoped to raise around 500 million euros this year through the tax, but the 2021 finance bill puts the figure at 400 million.

Facebook’s position is “to ensure compliance with all tax laws in the jurisdictions where we operate.” Other tech companies have made similar statements.

Paris has announced that it will withdraw the tax as soon as an OECD agreement is reached to update the rules on cross-border taxation in the age of e-commerce, where large internet companies can record profits in low tax countries, regardless of where their customers are located. .

Talks have stalled as the Trump administration has become reluctant to sign a multilateral deal ahead of the U.S. presidential election, while the global pandemic has added to practical difficulties in the negotiations, officials said.

“We will levy this digital tax in mid-December, as we have always explained to the US administration,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Monday at a Bloomberg event.

“Our goal remains to have an OECD agreement by the first months of 2021 as we remain deeply convinced that … the best way to deal with this key issue of digital taxation is to obtain a multilateral agreement in the OECD framework, ”he added.

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