Company Taxes in the European Union: Criteria and Options for Reform

<p>In 1992, the Ruding Committee, appointed by the European Commission to examine the need for company tax (CT) harmonisation in the European Union (EU), presented its findings and recommendations.2 Although the Committee concluded that differences in CTs distort the workings of the internal market - differences which most likely would not be eliminated by market forces or tax competition - it none the less proposed to leave the CTs in the EU essentially the same as it had found them, replete with their widely diverging domestic and cross-border treatment of different kinds of returns and different kinds of recipients of the various returns. As argued below, however, differential treatment will perpetuate the distortions inherent to the current CTs and erode the taxing authority of source states. A minimum statutory CT rate of 30 per cent, proposed by the Ruding Committee, and the adoption of the draft.</p>