Mr. Mike Lewis:

There are two things to say about this. First, if I may return to something Ms O'Brien said, it is no secret that there is serious dissensus within the OECD and within the inclusive framework on this area of tax policy-making.

That dissensus is readable in the interim report the OECD produced in late March. I do not believe we should be optimistic that the OECD will necessarily be the body that will rapidly bring out very ambitious proposals in this area. We should not over-estimate the extent to which the OECD is an inclusive forum. We can talk about how the decisions are made there at length, if the Senator wishes.

One of the reasons for that dissensus, as Ms O'Brien said, is that there are members of the inclusive framework who would wish to confine the OECD's consideration in this area to a smaller number of highly digitised companies and economic activities and they would wish to use this opportunity to think in more fundamental terms about dysfunctions of the global tax system, in particular, problems of nexus and the allocation of profits, which are essentially the two overarching issues with which the OECD's recent report on the challenges of digitalisation deals. Our argument would be that if we are going to use the OECD as effectively the global forum where these questions should be considered, we would hope all members of the inclusive framework, including Ireland, would allow that body to think in deeper and more ambitious terms about some of the areas of nexus and allocation of profits that were not dealt with in the original base erosion and profit shifting, BEPS, package, rather than trying to get a quick set of proposals that would deal with a narrow set of highly digitised economic activities. That is the risk with this accelerated timeline at the OECD.

It is all very well to wait for a global agreement in this area but it ignores the reality that major economies outside the European Union are already taking unilateral action in this area, for example, with measures such as the significant economic presence proposals both within legislation and case law in India and the way China has approached a broader definition of technical services, for example, to encompass some of the digital services we are discussing. The cat is already out of the bag in terms of global harmonisation. That is exactly why, if we are going to do this at the OECD, whatever the OECD comes up with will have to satisfy those kinds of economies too and that is why it needs to be ambitious.