Tax Justice

When multinational companies and wealthy individuals utilise secrecy, loopholes and mismatches of tax systems or influence governments to offer generous tax breaks to avoid paying their fair share of tax, the impacts are felt by all the citizens, left to deal with increasing inequalities, painful austerity measures and lack or loss of (quality) public services. As often the case, here too the hardest hit are the ones in the poorest countries.

Point persons

Olivia Lally Tove Ryding

Intro

Fair and effective tax collection is essential for raising country’s own revenues to meet its development goals by delivering services that its citizens need. Furthermore, tax structures can be used to increase accountability of governments to their citizens.

Although tax appears too technical to most, due to its key role in development, a growing number of civil society organisations are engaging with tax policies, whether on their links to poverty and social exclusion, women’s rights or access to essential services, aid or debt, climate, corporate social responsibility, or the impacts of investors on local communities.
Working together with members and other allies, Eurodad advocates for greater transparency, effectiveness and enhanced coordination of taxation systems worldwide. Eurodad also works to ensure that international institutions and treaties do not constrain developing countries’ policy space on this area.

The Eurodad Tax Justice work follows a three-track approach focused on:

Europe, with the aim of increasing transparency and preventing tax practices that facilitate tax dodging. We have a special focus on working for the adoption of an ambitious EU directive on public country by country reporting and preventing harmful tax practices in Europe.
The global level, with an aim to influence the global tax rules and decision-making processes. Our key focus is to push for the establishment of a well-resourced, transparent intergovernmental tax commission under the United Nations (UN). We believe that this should be the place for global decision making on tax matters, as opposed to the current situation, where the decisions take place in forums led by the OECD. As part of the international work, we also follow and comment on OECD-led processes, without legitimizing them.
Strengthening the European and global tax movement through Tax Justice Europe (TJ-E) and the Global Alliance for Tax Justice (GATJ), while ensuring that GATJ remains a southern-led coalition.

Current key work streams for the tax justice team are:

Covid-19 and Tax Justice: Coordination, strategising, response in the short-, medium- and long-term.
EU: Public country by country reporting.
Globally: OECD digital tax negotiations + UN intergovernmental tax commission.