últimas notícias

Congress would also have to revise tax treaties to give other nations the power to tax large U.S. multinationals based on where their products were sold. That legislation would require the support of Republicans, who have shown no inclination to vote for it.

American technology giants such as Google and Amazon have largely backed the proposed tax changes as a way to put an end to the complex thicket of European digital services taxes that have been enacted in recent years. If the agreement unravels, they will face a new wave of uncertainty.

The entire project has been on shaky ground in recent months amid continuing opposition in the European Union, delays over technical fine print and concerns about whether the United States would actually join. Nevertheless, it remains possible that the European Union and other countries will still move ahead with the agreement, leaving the United States as an awkward outlier from a deal that it revived last year.

“With or without the U.S., there does seem to be a very significant chance that that architecture will be stood up,” said Manal Corwin, a Treasury official in the Obama administration who now heads the Washington national tax practice at KPMG. “Once you get a few countries that make those first moves, whether it’s the E.U. or some other critical mass, I think you’ll see others follow pretty quickly.”

That poses risks for U.S. companies, including the chance that their tax bills could go up, given an enforcement mechanism that the Treasury Department helped create to nudge reluctant countries into the agreement. If the United States doesn’t adopt a 15 percent minimum tax, American companies with subsidiaries in participating countries could wind up paying penalty taxes to those foreign governments.

“If Congress doesn’t adopt, that doesn’t prevent the European Union and Japan and others from moving forward in this area, at which point, I think, Congress would see it’s in the U.S. interest to adopt, because otherwise our companies will also get hit by this enforcement principle,” Kimberly Clausing, who recently left her job as Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis, said at a Tax Policy Center event last month.