It'll still be possible to game that system because there information needed to enforce it should be given by the company itself.<p>The game of where to put the profit and where to put the loss by big corporation with multiple companies registered around the world is the way effective taxes are lowered now. Apple has been doing that for years and the bigger the company the easier is to do it.<p>The easiest way to avoid paying this is to shift the profits to another "consulting", "licensing", "distribution" deal. You pay this company almost all your profit and put the expenses in your P&L. Now you need to pay the tax only to what you've chosen to pay. Even with GAAP standards there are ways to do it. The "transfer pricing" quagmire exists for a reason, it's almost impossible to claim that this/that "licensing" deal isn't priced properly.<p>It looks like this is a populist move to claim "we're taxing the rich", but it won't work as expected unless all the information from all the countries goes into 1 centralized place to be analysed. In Germany there is lot's of bad decisions and this is one of them. (like the one to shut down their reactors and burn coal instead).
I hope they realise that every tax levied on a corporation will simply get passed on to the consumer eventually. I don't think these additional taxes make any sense along with a personal income tax. It should be one or the other.
They shouldn't be surprised if corporations leave their market. I'm philosophical about this. The world is moving toward smaller more fragmented economies. On the negative side, supply chains will have to adjust and the world economy will become less dynamic. On the plus side, local economic ecosystems will develop. Diversity.
The most interesting part to me is that Germany is attempting to tax worldwide income. The USA does this of course, although there are tax treaties that can reduce US taxes on some foreign earnings. The USA can get away with this because most companies simply can’t exit the US so there will be assets to seize and so on. On the other hand Amazon or Google or even Apple could just nope out of Germany and preserve their rest of world income.