Divisions Stark as UN Tax Treaty Drafting Deadlines Approach

Top negotiators at the United Nations in coming weeks will begin threading the needle between countries’ competing views of a new global tax treaty’s scale of ambition as deadlines for the deal’s first drafts draw near.

Whether the treaty should replace the use of physical presence as a legal basis to tax multinationals persisted as a fundamental bone of contention during a two-week meeting in New York earlier this month. And a new fault line emerged: whether the treaty should require countries to renegotiate existing bilateral tax treaties to be compliant with the UN deal.

The UN committee crafting the ...