Global Downturn Creates New Tension for OECD Tax Rewrite

Economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has created a dilemma for the OECD-led effort to overhaul global tax rules: How will negotiators deal with massive global losses.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has been trying to get nearly 140 countries to rewrite how the digital economy is taxed. The effort is driven by concerns that multinationals, especially tech giants like Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., aren’t paying taxes in the countries where they have customers and users.

Before the Covid-19 outbreak, negotiators were mainly focused on how to reallocate part of multinational companies’ taxable profits among those countries ...