The Delineation and Apportionment of an EU Consolidated Tax Base for Multi-jurisdictional Corporate Income Taxation: a Review of Issues and Options.

The Commission Services study on Company Taxation in the Internal Market and the Communications COM(2001)582 and COM(2003)726 on EU company taxation presented a long-term strategy to tackle the corporate income tax obstacles in the Internal Market by providing multi-jurisdictional companies with a consolidated tax base for their EU-wide activities for corporate taxation purposes. This comprehensive approach relies on a number of crucial steps such as delineating the CTB and choosing the mechanism for apportioning the multinationals' tax bases between the relevant Member States, so that they can then apply the national corporation tax rate to their respective shares. This work systematically addresses some of the fundamental questions that arise when considering the design of a consolidation + apportionment system for sharing multinationals' consolidated profits between EU Member States.