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Summary:
The OECD is hoping to reach a global solution on the challenge of taxing digital services, which mostly affects US companies.
With Donald Trump no longer occupying the White House, there is hope that the US will be taking a less combative approach to global trade issues and that President Biden will take a more collaborative, conciliatory stance. High on the agenda in 2021 is the ongoing fight over how countries fairly tax digital services, which in reality mostly impacts the US tech giants.
And time is of the essence, as the OECD aims to reach an agreement by this Summer, before more countries begin taking a nationalistic approach to the issue. The likes of the UK, France and Spain have all either signalled or already implemented their own digital services tax plans - and plan to persist with them if an internationally agreed solution is not found.
techUK and the Global Business Community call on EU to Safeguard International Data Flows
techUK and the Global Business Community call on EU to Safeguard International Data Flows
techUK has joined a wide-ranging coalition of industry groups in a call to the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the European Commission to ensure much-needed legal certainty around data flows in and outside of the bloc.
As a recent BusinessEurope-led coalition statement underlines, an unduly restrictive approach to data flows would have a significant effect on European industries and risks damaging the competitiveness and innovative capability of the EU’s digital economy. In their current form, the draft Recommendations would mean that a very large number of existing business functions carried out by EEA and non-EEA based companies would either no longer be permitted or extremely risky to carry out. This approach, coupled with the unrealistic regulatory burden placed on smaller firms, risk