By Nikunj Ohri and Manoj Kumar
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India is assessing whether a global corporate tax deal agreed between 140 nations can work following U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the landmark 2021 arrangement, a senior bureaucrat in the finance ministry said.
Last month, Trump declared the global corporate minimum tax deal “has no force or effect” in the U.S., effectively removing his country from it.
“If you say that the U.S. as a country goes away, then I think we will have to evaluate whether the whole framework will work,” Finance Secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey told Reuters in an interview on Sunday.
After years of stalled negotiations on global tax issues hosted by the Paris based-Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a global deal to ensure big companies pay a minimum tax rate of 15% was sealed in 2021.
The two-part tax deal aims to end competitive reductions in corporate tax rates around the world and made it harder for highly profitable multinational companies to avoid taxation.
India, party to the second of the two pillars in the deal, will assess how the arrangement can work when major technological companies based in the U.S. do not have to honour it, Pandey said.
“It was a global thing, it can’t be unilateral,” Pandey added.
Separately, India has long lodged its reservations against the first pillar of the deal and Pandey said those issues have not been addressed.
Its concerns included the subjection of tax-related disputes to international arbitration and the treatment of withholding tax under the “Pillar 1” arrangement.
(Writing by Shivangi Acharya; editing by Barbara Lewis)
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