Questions and Answers on a Fair and Efficient Tax System in the EU for the Digital Single Market

Why has the Commission presented a Digital Tax Package?

Every day, 20 billion emails and 150 million social media posts are written, and 650 million online searches are carried out in the EU. These statistics show how much the internet has transformed our lives. Yet not everything has kept pace: global corporate tax rules are over one hundred years old and are out of step with the boom in the digital economy. They were designed for 'brick-and-mortar' businesses, meaning that a company should be physically present in a country to be taxed there. Companies that do business and generate value online are now growing far quicker than the economy at large, yet today's rules cannot effectively tax profits generated largely from consumer data.