US urges countries to suspend digital taxes, says wait for OECD agreement

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is urging countries like France to suspend taxes on global computing giants such as Google and Amazon and wait for a negotiated agreement on international taxation, according to a letter released on Wednesday.

As the United States is poised to impose tariffs of up to 100 per cent on $2.4 billion in French products over that country’s digital services tax, Mnuchin said talks in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development are key to resolving the issue.

“We believe that it is very important that these talks reach agreement in order to prevent the proliferation of unilateral measures, like digital services taxes, which threaten the longstanding multilateral consensus on international taxation,” Mnuchin said in a letter to OECD chief Jose Angel Gurria.