So if a company had $100B global revenue and $10B global profit and 0% of the profit was in France while 10% of the revenue was in France, then the company should be taxed based on the $1B profit that can be attributed to France based on revenue there.
Any other scheme seems it’s prone to creative licensing schemes and similar.
You will have to go after financialization tricks, where healthy companies get loaded with debt, weird tricks with assets and all the stuff the finance industry comes up with that has nothing to do with core function of the company. Now imagine the powerful lobby you have to work against.
Food for thought: in a distribution chain you will find lots of small value adds. Take sea ports, there are loads of companies that handle import of materials or products. The price they charge for their goods/services are dominated by their import costs.
Consequently, it’s a terrible idea.
If anything bigger buisnesses have more ressources to avoid taxes. - Thus having everyone pay the same would lead to large companies paying more than they do now and small companies would be barely affected.
corporations aren't people, and I think you know this. "corporate personhood" means that a corporation has some (not all) of the rights held by individual people. it certainly does not mean that it makes sense to tax corporations as if they were humans that filed a W-2 each year.
what do you think would be solved by jacking up the corporate tax rate specifically? or put differently, whose pocket do you imagine this money comes out of?
the owners are already taxed on any income or capital gains they derive from ownership, employee pay is taxed on both sides, and retail customers pay sales tax. none of those taxes are necessarily optimal, but their impact is at least better understood than corporate tax.
If a global company like Google pays a global company like Apple $K billion to be the default search engine on iphones, should Apple consider that revenue to be all in the US because Google is headquartered in the US even though it's purchasing something that will apply to people in lots of countries? Does it matter if Google uses local corporations in a number of companies to each pay Apple? If Google pays through its subsidiary in the jurisdiction with the highest corporate taxes, can it force Apple to realize revenue there?
Then there is little or no revenue local to France.
Why is that fair? In your example, if UK provided 100% of the labor shouldn’t UK get 100% of the tax to support social programs for that 100% labor?
Labor seems a better way to distribute and incentivize employment.
Work effort could be distorted in whatever fashion the country wants. They could declare all their work is done in some off shore 0% tax nation and pay nothing.
The UK gets 100% already from the income tax for their workers.
It’s not fair in the sense that the right countries necessarily get the tax money - but it’s certainly more likely than it is today.
It’s not fair in that it guarantees businesses aren’t taxed too much or too little, but it does guarantee that the profits are taxed somewhere which ends the incentive to shift the profits around.
Perhaps “fair” is the wrong word. I mean “fair” as in hard to evade overall, not fair distribution.