Ms Cora O'Brien:

There are a few issues there. There is a lot of agreement between what we are saying on the global approach. Later, I can talk about some of the details of the BEPS issues which Mr. McCaughey raised if the Senator wishes. However, as an overall principle, the BEPS approach worked very well as a global initiative agreed at a global level and then implemented regionally. With a speed unheard of, the EU took the globally agreed measures of the BEPS project, converted them into an EU directive and within six months that directive was adopted. We are all now in the process of implementing it. The reason it was possible to progress the particular EU directives which came out of BEPS quickly was because all the members states had agreed, in principle, to the measures at the OECD. It enabled the thing to be fast-tracked.

We think that a similar process is the way to go here. Rather than having two parallel regimes and having one being brought in by the EU through these short-term and long-term measures that may have to be superseded by or run alongside another regime agreed globally, it is better to go with a global approach in the first instance. At the weekend, we saw that an urgency is felt at the OECD about getting this done quickly. The interim report was brought forward from 2019 to 2018. There was talk at the weekend about getting an agreement in 2019 rather than 2020. On the one hand, the OECD process is speeding up as a result of the urgency and, on the other, it is not actually very far behind the EU proposals in any event because the effective date for both is 1 January 2020. We could end up with EU measures that might create many problems and be very difficult to unwind for the sake of not having to wait a short time to get global agreement on an overall approach.