The #CbCR statistics are out today as part of #CorpTaxStats https://bit.ly/38yW7uQ . https://twitter.com/search ? It’s a big deal in terms of data on MNEs, #BEPS, and their activities. A quick thread with some thoughts on what they mean and don’t mean for analysis of BEPS. 1/

1. The stats come with a major disclaimer ( https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/anonymised-and-aggregated-cbcr-statistics-disclaimer.pdf) pointing to some limitations. In addition to the coverage , and the fact that this is a first year of data so not all MNEs reported in all cases, there is also an issue of double counting of profits. 2/

This has also recently been the subject of some conversations regarding other data sets recently e.g. by @KClausing ( https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3503091) and Blouin and Rombinson ( https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/blouinrobinson_ssrn.pdf) 3/

But it’s an issue for CBCR as well. Specifically, in some countries intra-company dividends are included in profit figure within a country, but in some countries they are excluded. This means that the profit figures in some countries are artificially high, 4/

and effective tax rates are artificially low. So, in the next few days, we expect to see a lot of articles saying that companies in country X only paid an effective tax rate of Y – be advised to take these ETR figures with a grain of salt (or several grains). 5/

2. Does this mean that the CBCR don’t say anything about BEPS? No! There are plenty of signs in the data that point to continued #beps

Adding a link to the next tweet because I can't thread: https://twitter.com/PierceOReilly/status/1280800766937239552