G-20 ministers agree to redouble efforts to tax technology behemoths

TOKYO: Finance Ministers from Group of 20 nations agreed they need to find a common method to tax technology giants, whose digital business models have grown exponentially faster than systems to tax them.

“We agreed on a need to redouble our efforts to reach consensus by 2020,” Japanese Vice Minister for Finance Masatsugu Asakawa said on Saturday following a G-20 symposium on international taxation that brought together finance ministers from nations including the US, China and France. “Should we fail to meet our commitment, we will see more and more unilateral actions and the fragmentation of the international tax system.”

G20 officials gathered in Fukuoka, Japan, at the weekend sounded growing alarm about the world economy and signaled a willingness to increase stimulus. At the same time, they made little progress in addressing the main threat of trade tensions.


While the talks opened with some rare good news as Donald Trump reversed his plans to hit Mexico with tariffs, the US-China impasse showed no signs of easing. Officials recognised that in their concluding statement by noting that trade tensions have “intensified”.

Finance officials have been discussing whether to endorse a plan from the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development that would impose higher tax rates on multinational companies, including tech giants such as Facebook and Alphabet’s Google.

“For the time being there is no fair taxation of this new economic model,” said French Finance Minister.

He said businesses within the new economic model focused on the use of data are the most efficient in “creating a lot of profits without a fair taxation.”