After 4 years of negotiations the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) set a minimum global tax rate of 15% for big companies and sought to make it harder for them to avoid taxation. The Biden Administration’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is pushing for Congress to implement this agreement in the pending Reconciliation Bill.
The trouble? Under our Constitution the Senate must ratify any treaty with a two-thirds majority, or 67 votes. Votes that aren’t there. Yellen and the Administration hope to push through these measures by modify existing bilateral tax treaties – that require a bare majority.