Government view sought on EU tax transparency initiative

The House of Commons’ European Scrutiny Committee has written to the government asking its view on recent progress in the EU’s plans to introduce mandatory publication of reports by large multinationals showing where they pay their corporate taxes and how much. Before leaving the EU the UK had consistently underlined the merits of such EU-wide public country-by-country reporting policies.

In its latest regular report scrutinising the effect on the UK of new or proposed EU legislation the committee asked the financial secretary to the Treasury Steve Barclay whether the government would be willing to discuss co-operating with the EU in this area of taxation and corporate reporting.

After nearly five years of negotiations the committee noted most EU member states in February 2021 supported the introduction of public country-by-country reporting of tax information by large multinationals which have operations in...