A digital tax at the European level has failed, now sets Germany's Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD) entirely on a solution under the leadership of the industrialized countries OECD. Officially there are no plans for a national digital tax, as decided by several other EU countries, just as in the case that an agreement at international level should fail. This emerges from a still unpublished answer to a small request of the Greens, which is the SPIEGEL.

Accordingly, the Federal Government "strongly supports the current work of the OECD on the revision of international taxation principles", which should then be "implemented throughout the EU". It is "confident that the OECD will present results in 2020", which are supported by the consensus of the participating states. "Such a solution is then internationally accepted and can be implemented by the states."

Scholz is in favor of worldwide minimum tax rates. They are intended to pay digital companies more money than they often do today thanks to sophisticated tax-saving models. However, there are other proposals in the discussion, involving a total of 128 states. They could significantly expand the taxation of corporations outside their home countries, which Germany rejects. An international agreement is therefore by no means certain and can be expected at the earliest in the coming year anyway. For a long time, countries like France or Austria did not want to wait and introduced digital taxes on their own.

Bayern's attack fails

Bavarian tax officials had become impatient in the meantime. Relying on paragraph 50a of the Income Tax Act, they levied a 15% withholding tax on companies that placed online ads on platforms such as Google or Facebook. The money should then bring back the companies in the US companies - this would have been asked about a detour to checkout.

But this attempt failed. Expenditure on online advertising did not fall under the tax deduction under clause 50a, it says in the answer. "This opinion will now be uniformly represented by the tax authorities after coordination between the highest tax authorities of the Federation and the Länder."

The Bavarian Finance Minister Albert Füracker (CSU) had also announced that they would not pursue the approach further and justified this among other things with "bureaucratic additional expenditure" and "substantial additional taxes".

How high the effort would have been, however, remains open. The federal government claims to have no data on how many companies received a request to pay the 15 percent tax. The Federal Ministry of Finance wants to publish a clarification on the decision in a separate letter.

Green finance politician Danyal Bayaz criticized Scholz's digital control strategy. "The SPD Minister of Finance puts everything on the map OECD," he said. There is not even agreement between the US, Britain, Germany and France on the best way. Scholz must invest more power in a European agreement. "Otherwise, more years of inaction threaten the tax dumping of global digital companies."