U.S. Backs 15% Global Minimum Tax to Curb Profit Shifting Overseas

The finance ministers from France and Germany indicated last month that they were willing to back a 21 percent rate. But countries will have to change their laws to formally make the agreement happen, and enforcement of the deal will be complicated. Ireland, which is not a member of the steering committee undertaking the negotiations through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, has a 12.5 percent corporate tax rate and has expressed reservations about such an agreement. Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, also expressed skepticism this week.

Manal Corwin, a former Treasury Department official in the Obama administration who now heads the Washington national tax practice at KPMG, said that other countries had been under the impression that the United States was set on a 21 percent global minimum tax, which would match the tax rate the Biden administration has proposed for U.S.-based companies’ foreign income. The fact that the U.S. is ready to negotiate from a lower rate is important, she said.

“To get a deal, it was important for the U.S. to clarify that they’re not necessarily saying 21 percent or nothing,” Ms. Corwin said.

Still, she added, the 15 percent “floor” could be too high for some countries to accept and too low to win approval from some members of Congress in the United States.

Rohit Kumar, leader of PwC’s Washington National Tax Services office, said that the reaction from Ireland and other countries to the proposal will be crucial because a tax agreement reached through the negotiations would be far from ironclad.

“Do countries actually change national law and enact it? Or is it just a political agreement where everyone is says, ‘That’s nice, but we’re not doing it?’” Mr. Kumar, a former top aid to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said. “As U.S. lawmakers are examining these proposals, that is the several trillion dollar question.”

Treasury officials said that they never insisted on the 21 percent rate, but that they believed that other countries were receptive to the idea of adopting a rate higher than 15 percent depending on the fate of the changes to the American tax system that are under consideration.