BEPS Policy Failure—The Case of EU Country-By-Country Reporting¹

The tax gap between taxes that are “actually” paid and taxes that “ought” to have been paid by multinational corporate entities has become an area of huge public policy concern in the recent decades. This study reviews the impact of new legislation to reveal the tax gap created by the EU banks and financial institutions passed in 2013 and in particular of the quality of the resulting country-by-country reporting (CBCR) requirement for banks. Although resulting tax gap estimates are noted, they suffer due to significant problems in the published data; much of it is due to the quality of the regulation requiring its publication and implementation. The findings reveal a lack of understanding of the technical and structural weaknesses of accounting in a transnational context in the design of this regulation. CBCR is destined to fail in achieving its regulatory objectives in this context unless necessary reform of the regulation is undertaken.