By Alex M. Parker

Law360 (March 9, 2020, 5:49 PM EDT) -- The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is moving ahead with planned meetings for its project to overhaul the global tax system while canceling other public events because of concerns over the COVID-19 outbreak, an agency official said Monday.

The Paris-based organization has canceled a March 17 public consultation for review of public country-by-country reporting rules adopted as part of the 2015 Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, as well as most other in-person meetings, according to a message on its website. But officials are continuing meetings with working groups involved with its far-reaching plan to forge an agreement on digital tax issues while allowing for parties to teleconference.

"We will continue to have our meetings on digital as they are a priority and time-sensitive and we are providing videoconferencing for those who can't be physically present," said Grace Perez-Navarro, deputy director for tax policy and administration at the OECD.

The project must finish by the end of the year, according to a deadline set by the Group of 20 consortium of advanced economies, who initially requested the OECD look into the topic with a letter in 2017.

OECD officials have spent the past three years hoping to devise a consensus on how to address digital transactions not easily taxed by the current international rules.

Individual countries such as France are moving ahead with digital service taxes targeted at revenue from online activities like advertising and data collection. This has provoked the U.S. into threatening retaliatory tariffs against what it claims are discriminatory taxes. All sides seemed near a deal that would extend market countries more taxing rights, but the U.S. threw cold water on the proposal in December, claiming it strayed too far from existing tax principles.

Pascal Saint-Amans, the OECD's director for tax and administration, has said he hopes to have an agreement in place before the G-20 finance ministers meeting in July. But ultimately, Dec. 31 is the only hard deadline — aside from the G-20 letter — as it's when a shaky truce between the U.S. and France will expire and when the Trump administration has vowed to impose tariffs on French products.

While the coronavirus has not yet directly affected the project, it has thrown up some additional obstacles. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have canceled their annual April meetings in Washington, D.C., opting instead for a virtual format. The OECD has used April meetings as a chance to meet with government officials about the digital project, although it is not an official OECD event.   

The organization does not have any public consultations on the project on its calendar.

--Editing by Joyce Laskowski. 

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