G20 leaders on November 16, in Antalya (Turkey), adopted OECD’s (Organization for Economic Coorperation and Development) plan to fight multinational tax avoidance.

In the final communiqué of their summit, the leaders of the twenty most powerful economies worldwide insisted on a wide and coherent implementation of this BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) plan, especially in regards to the delicate issue of agreements between tax authorities and multinational (tax rulings). They also called-in the developing countries to do the same

The G20 has in fact, trusted OECD with the “monitoring of BEPS’” implementation and instructed it to establish a “structure” to attend to this mission in 2016.

Tax optimization practices that mainly consist in exploiting discrepancies in national legislations, resort to accounting subtleties and to act on preferential tax regimes; allow multinationals to save between 100 and 240 billion dollars each year, OECD’s estimates show.

BEPS therefore intends to implement a series of measures to overcome these failures, worldwide, within national legislations or bilateral fiscal conventions that allow some profits to completely evade tax, or to force global giants to expose in details the records for all their activities and the taxes they pay in each country they operate in (state to state declaration).

Various NGOs including Tax & Justice however believe that this new plan to fight tax optimization is far from being a panacea, stating that “OECD is not the best option in regards to finding a solution to the troublesome issue of multinational tax avoidance considering that this organization in reality is a think-tank at the service of about thirty developed countries.”