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Comment by HorstG | Hacker News Reader

The EU will never close tax loopholes since there will always be a veto from the likes of Ireland, Netherlands, Luxembourgh or UK.

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Couldn't any member state just choose to tax daughter companies in their own country, whether or not those daughter companies were buying IP from the mother company in Ireland? Basically choose not to accept transfer pricing as actually reducing the profits in their country, so just tax them anyway. Is this actually against any EU charter? Because my impression was that EU basically does not have jurisdiction over how each country taxes companies within its borders, only that they have to do so uniformly (cf. the fine on Ireland and Apple where they were taxing Apple less than other companies in Ireland). As far as I can tell, what is needed to fix transfer pricing isn't a change of the tax law in tax havens, it's a change of the tax law in all the other countries that want to stop being exploited by them.

No, not the UK

Uh really? Check any list of the world's tax havens, and you will see the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Man, and Bermuda. The City of London has been a conduit through which wealth has been pilfered to these territories for a long time. They may shout from the rooftops about others' improprieties, but I seriously doubt their commitment to meaningfully overhaul their own house.

I think it was a comment about the UK no longer being a member of the EU soon (we shall see).

In fact rumor has it that a major reason for the Brexit campaign was that there was a threat of very costly corporate tax loopholes being closed in new EU wide legislation.

Which makes little sense since the country had veto, and now they wont?

When I looked at this there was a very narrow set of new rules that would need to be introduced into UK law (I found a paper on the EU website, however https://fullfact.org/online/brexit-not-concealing-offshore-a... matches up with my memory).

Primarily the new rules are based on the existing UK rules and I'm guessing whatever legal changes were required are still going through.

That rumour isn't accurate. The origins of the Brexit campaign are well documented and understood, tax doesn't feature in it. It came out of the rise of UKIP who campaigned primarily on immigration and sovereignty, with the two being intertwined because, immigration was said to be high due to the EU forbidding any controls on intra-EU migration. That rise combined with long term Tory euroscepticism pushed Cameron to promise a referendum to win over UKIP voters, a promise he made good on, and then the Remain campaign lost.

Add Malta and Cyprus to that list.

Wow. The EU requires unanimous approval. The Europeans looks at the US’ Articles of Confederation and said, “we can make that work.” They need a rogue group of reformers that create a new system of government, illegally, like the US’ Federalists. Only then will the EU get its shit together.

Only for matters considered critical and sensitive for member states - finance, EU membership, harmonisation of legislation etc. it's mostly a hold over from the days of an EEC with 6 or 9 members (ie, right back when UK and Ireland joined in 73), when unanimity worked much better than it can now. Obviously to step back from unanimity requires unanimous vote without use of veto. :)

Most matters are done under qualified majority - which is a small super-majority based on population.

A post-Brexit UK going full on offshore tax haven might encourage the EU to get their act together on finance, and come up with some ways to crack down. Well, one can hope...

The reason the EU's system is so similar is that the circumstances are similar. If you don't require unanimous approval on critical issues then why would smaller countries ever join with Germany, France, Italy, and the UK around?

If you require unanimous agreement how can you ever prevent a bad actor from taking advantage of the system?

By persuading them. It's also much less of a problem that a small country as a bad actor takes advantage of the system compared to big countries abusing smaller ones.

Will Ireland vote against their current income?

He he. The US Articles of Confederation had an European predecessor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto :-D

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