Hello, I would like to get your thoughts on this topic I have been thinking about for a while.
I work for a large multinational company, 8B turnover, HQ in Switzerland and US.
I’m worried that with the new flat tax of 15% having an HQ in CH will loose all its attractiveness over other countries with a cheaper labour like NL for example.
I work in digital transformation and I’m quite worried they will just de-localize.
Do you know if the cantons will locally take any measures. The social impact would be huge.
Probably I’m not a tax expert so I don’t understand the whole picture…
The 15% tax is not a flat tax but a minimum tax. Its main target is to eliminate tax setups spanning multiple countries that allowed companies to pay very little to no effective taxes.
For Switzerland the minimum tax results in a slight increase for the cheapest cantons from today’s level of around 12% in Zug or Lucerne. As the low tax canton’s do not want to increase their effective tax rates, they will try to compensate this effect with new deductions and other benefits and reduced costs for companies.
So yes, Switzerland will lose a bit in its advantage in direct comparison to high tax countries, but it also eliminates some direct competitors with even lower or no corporate taxes today.
Overall, I personally don’t think the global minimum tax of 15% will have a significant impact on anything. But I also think this is just the beginning, and once established we will see the rate increasing in the coming decades.
At the moment, decisions on locations (for employees, not taxable profits which can be vastly different) are AFAIK mostly considering the available labour market and expected labour inflation anyway. While Switzerland’s attractiveness on the available labour market vastly differs by job, we certainly have much lower long-term labour inflation expectations than many countries today.
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It’s happening as planned on Jan 1st.
I find it quite surprising that this is not being discussed on the mainstream medias.
I do believe that the negative impact on CH competitiveness can be quite huge, even a 1% increase when talking about billions in turnover is huge.
Any tax experts here that can explain what is the plan of the CH gov. To compensate this?
I heard something about removing the withholding tax for multinationals…
One of, let’s say three (?) resident tax experts checking-in. Let’s see:
- This concerned you exactly one year ago, and apparently still does today. Yet you obviously didn’t read the reading material linked in the media release you posted. Why, it would answer most of your questions?
- You seemingly have very little knowledge about taxation, yet despite that you are convinced that this will have a huge impact. Why, what’s your basis for this assessment?
- You say there is no media coverage, when exactly the opposite is true. This was reported days ago in nearly all media, and extensively last summer when there was a public vote on this! What?!
So, let me ask you, because your behaviour is a little bit of a conundrum to me: What is it you are expecting to get as an answer here?
PS: I realize I sound a bit salty here. I am not, just confused by this all. Happy holidays 
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