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Spotlight

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) shortly will lead a delegation of committee members to OECD headquarters in Paris to discuss the BEPS 2.0 project. The trip, originally planned for earlier this summer but postponed, reportedly is meant to express congressional concerns to the OECD and European officials regarding various aspects of the BEPS 2.0 project. Although the delegation has not disclosed what will be on the meeting agenda, bipartisan congressional tax leaders have pointed to the Pillar Two Undertaxed Profits Rule (UTPR) as particularly problematic. Chairman Smith and other congressional tax leaders have indicated that Congress will have final say on any BEPS agreement to which the US is a party.

The Ways and Means Committee held a hearing in July at which members expressed growing frustration with how the Biden Administration has handled the BEPS negotiations. The OECD later in July issued several technical documents, including one that floated a transitional UTPR safe harbor, among other proposals.

A senior OECD official this week was quoted as saying that it is “certainly possible and likely” that there will be simplifications made to how companies file global minimum tax information used to determine minimum tax liabilities. The GloBE Information Return was finalized this summer and includes a transitional framework for simplified reporting on a jurisdictional, rather than entity, basis, in addition to specifying how the information is to be shared among jurisdictions that implement the GloBE Rules.

The United Nations (UN) this week released a final report suggesting alternative options to promote international tax cooperation. The report offers an analysis of the existing arrangements in international cooperation and provides other options to “make such cooperation fully inclusive and more effective and outlines potential next steps.” According to the report, enhancing the UN’s role “in tax-norm shaping and rule-setting, with full consideration of existing multilateral and international arrangements, appears the most viable path for making international tax cooperation fully inclusive and more effective.” As in an earlier released draft, the final report identifies three options to be considered, including a tax multilateral convention, a framework convention on international tax cooperation, and a framework for international tax cooperation.

A Senate Finance Committee aide this week confirmed that a hearing on the Biden Administration’s nomination of Marjorie Rollinson to be the next IRS Chief Counsel will be on the committee’s agenda when the Senate returns from the August recess. Rollinson, a former IRS Associate Chief Counsel (International) was EY’s Deputy Director of National Tax among other senior EY positions. No date for a hearing has yet been set.