The EU Commission wants to introduce a new tax for digital companies, and has announced new legislative proposals to this effect. EU Economic Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said today that the favored option would be an EU-wide regulation that would authorize Member States to tax companies without headquarters or production in their countries.
However, Oliver Süme, Chair of the Board at eco, warns emphatically against such proposals: “The plans presented today by the EU Commission for the taxation of digital companies would lead us down the wrong path. We need a coherent tax system that establishes the same fair and comprehensible rules for all market participants. The Commission’s plans explicitly discriminate against the digital economy by taxing online advertising separately and by proposing a so-called search engine tax. The extra taxation of revenues from user data, to be imposed exclusively on digital companies, is also questionable. And the regulations with which the Commission proposes lowering the tax for small and medium-sized enterprises and avoiding double taxation do not alter this fact”.
