Ms Cora O'Brien:

There is a risk that we are increasing the tax businesses could expect to pay in Europe because more profits are going to higher jurisdictions. More important for them, because they are so accustomed to getting this right, for most of the big ones all their systems are geared to deal with country by country tax reporting. The cost of amalgamating all that would be huge. They have to keep their systems open for the non-EU transactions to be at arm's length and take cognisance of transfer pricing. They are running two systems that way. Their tax is higher and their costs are likely to be higher, albeit that there would be some savings because of the common base. Our research showed that it would be outweighed. One can imagine how many disputes there will be between tax authorities over allocation factors. The uncertainty and cost of that would be extensive.