Thank you for the question.
The work at the OECD and G20, the inclusive framework towards a global minimum tax regime for corporations, is very important in the context of some of the matters that have been raised at this committee today.
One of the key challenges in taxing multinational corporations appropriately is finding the right balance between ensuring that they pay their fair share and not unduly impeding their ability to compete with multinationals based in other countries. That latter consideration makes it difficult to tax at a higher rate or to have a more thorough approach to taxing their income earned abroad, because that could simply result in their not being able to effectively compete with multinationals that are taxed less severely by their home countries.
Trying to move individually on this type of situation is a challenge. The work that's going on at the G20 and the OECD inclusive framework are therefore trying to get agreement amongst a wide number of countries to set a minimum tax rate, which would then allow countries to ensure fairer taxation of their multinationals without having to worry about the harmful effects on the competitiveness of the multinationals based in their country.
The step forward at the G7 finance ministers' meeting was to get agreement amongst the seven countries to put forward a common position of a minimum rate of at least 15% and to have that calculated on a country-by-country basis, which helps to set the stage going forward to the broader G20 finance ministers' meeting in mid-year and the meeting of the OECD's inclusive framework, which includes 139 countries and which will be taking place at the end of this month, to try to promote agreement on the parameters of how that minimum tax could take shape and how it could move forward.
If this does end up working out, it will be a landmark achievement, because it's a way of addressing a lot of the problems many countries have been struggling to address on their own.