PARIS, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Governments should open a new front in the international clampdown on tax evasion with a global minimum tax on billionaires, which could raise $250 billion annually, the EU Tax Observatory said on Monday.
If levied, the sum would be equivalent to only 2% of the nearly $13 trillion in wealth owned by the 2,700 billionaires globally, the research group hosted at the Paris School of Economics said.
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If levied, the sum would be equivalent to only 2% of the nearly $13 trillion in wealth owned by the 2,700 billionaires globally, the research group hosted at the Paris School of Economics said.
“In our view, this is difficult to justify because it risks to undermine the sustainability of tax systems and the social acceptability of taxation,” the observatory’s director Gabriel Zucman told journalists.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget included plans for a 25% minimum tax on the wealthiest 0.01%, but that proposal has since fallen by the wayside with lawmakers in Washington preoccupied with government shutdown threats and looming funding deadlines.
Though a coordinated international push to tax billionaires could take years, the Observatory pointed to the example of governments’ success in all but ending bank secrecy and reducing opportunities for multinationals to shift profits to low-tax countries.
The 2018 launch of automatic sharing of account information has reduced the amount of wealth held in offshore tax havens by a factor of three, the observatory estimated.
For example the rich increasingly park wealth in real estate instead of offshore accounts while companies can exploit loopholes in the 15% corporate tax minimum.
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