Norway moves on Country by Country reporting

From Sigrid Klæboe Jacobsen, Director of TJN – Norge

In December, the Norwegian Parliament voted in favour of implementing country-by-country reporting. The Ministry of Finance has now announced the new regulations which tells us exactly what we’ve got, and what we haven’t got.

The reporting standard is still flawed, in that it does not show the full key data in tax havens, or countries where companies have «supporting functions», which is a term that the Ministry likes to use to refer to tax havens. But there are a couple of reasons to celebrate, just a little bit. The companies must disclose

• where their subsidiaries are registered – including the ones in tax havens.
• the numbers of employees in each subsidiary.
• the interest costs when their payments are made to other subsidiaries. This includes payments to tax havens.

Unfortunately, the list of what we haven’t got is a lot longer.

What about all other payments to tax havens? What about requirements for auditing? There’s also a dodgy sentence about companies not having to report from subsidiaries if the reporting «is too costly».

The standard will be evaluated in three years, in time before the EU will start its own CbC evaluation. As we have noted in our blog (only in Norwegian), Norway should evaluate CbC once a year, and continually improve the standard. This way, the Norwegian «experience» will be of real value to the EU.

We need to move forwards a bit faster: this snail’s pace is not good enough.