What are the proposals of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC)? A review and preliminary analysis of documents and communications by the private sector on the negotiations of the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.
By: Red de Justicia Fiscal de América Latina y el Caribe (RJFALC) with support from the Global Alliance for Tax Justice
Originally published by RJFALC in Spanish here.
The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) is a major global private sector lobby. The ICC’s work covers a wide range of economic activities, but it primarily expresses the interests of large corporations in international forums. The ICC’s technical teams actively participated in the negotiations of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for the UN Tax Cooperation Convention. The ICC’s playbook for international tax cooperation is based on the neoliberal quartet of deregulation, openness, privatization, and flexibility.
Following the first two sessions of negotiations, held in August 2025 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the ICC issued a statement stating that it is “advocating for predictable, stable global tax rules to support cross-border trade and investment.” The concepts and language used by the business entity stand out for their verboseness and commitment to the process, but the explicit objective of its interventions is to sustain the asymmetries in power relations in favor of the private sector (which is responsible for the main tax evasion and avoidance maneuvers).
The communiqué issued after the August sessions, along with the submissions made to the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (Workstream I – Framework Convention, Workstream II – Digital Economy, and Workstream III – Dispute Resolution and Prevention), presents the list of private sector demands. These demands not only revive neoliberal maxims in tax matters such as “legal certainty,” “tax certainty,” and the “right to privacy” of large companies and their owners, but also promote potentially harmful tools such as advance pricing agreements (APAs) or question valuable instruments for developing countries such as withholding taxes.
Below are the advocacy priorities reported by the ICC on its website, as well as excerpts from the presentations and suggestions made to the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee of the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation:
- Legal Certainty: “Legal certainty is a cornerstone of a well-functioning international tax system and is essential for both taxpayers and tax administrations to operate efficiently and with confidence.“
- Legal Certainty II: “Inclusion of taxpayers rights among the principles of the Framework Convention to ensure tax certainty alongside the right to be heard, the right to fair treatment and the right to confidentiality, among others.“
- Advance Pricing Agreements: “The importance of dispute prevention (through, for example, cooperative compliance and advance pricing agreements) and ensuring that effective and efficient mechanisms are in place when disputes do arise (e.g. binding arbitration).“
- Withholding Tax: “Tax policy should promote sustainable growth, job creation, and cross-border investment. This goal can be reached if legal certainty, stability, and simplicity are ensured. We express concern over growing complexity in international tax rules, especially proposals for sectoral taxes and the expansion of the scope of gross-basis withholding taxes on services. Such withholding taxes ignore the value or cost of services, reduce investment returns, and increase risks of double taxation, affecting companies of all sizes and regions.”
One of the aspects that the global tax justice movement questions is the idea of ”tax certainty,” warning that it clashes with demands for fair, inclusive, progressive, and efficient tax systems that enhance states’ ability to finance sustainable development. A mainstream definition of “tax certainty” is that it involves “ensuring the predictability, simplicity, and clarity of tax systems—rules, regulations, administration, and dispute resolution—in a way that reduces risks for taxpayers and administrations.” This is practically an unquestionable definition that, however, only seeks to pave the way for practices that erode the tax base and the ability of tax administrations to collect taxes. The ICC’s definition of “tax certainty” leads to a number of harmful ends: preventing regulatory changes that would improve countries’ ability to supervise and control taxation, legitimize advance pricing agreements, and minimize the scope of any anti-abuse measures. In this sense, the corporate lobby’s “tax certainty” would serve to:
- Prioritise the “security” of private investors over the certainty of public revenues necessary for financing public services and sustainable development. Under the demand for “tax certainty,” developing countries are forced to restrict their tax base and their oversight and monitoring capacities to avoid sending “negative signals” to the markets.
- Reinforce opacity and inequality. APAs and international arbitrations are closed processes that end up granting privileges to multinationals and eroding democratic legitimacy.
- Fuel the race to the bottom. Under the guise of providing “certainty,” many countries lower taxes and offer incentives that erode tax bases without improving services or rights.
- Disconnect taxation from social objectives. Corporate “certainty” is pursued without considering the need to finance public goods, gender equality, climate transition, and human rights. Tax certainty should not become synonymous with protecting privileges or freezing tax policy.
- Not guarantee productive investment. Evidence from the IMF, the World Bank, and UNCTAD shows that tax pressure is rarely the decisive variable for foreign investment. Factors such as the size of the domestic or external market, available infrastructure, the existence of a skilled workforce, and macroeconomic stability are much more relevant. Similarly, “tax incentives” are often inefficient, ineffective, and prone to abuse; they erode the tax base and fail to ensure quality investment.
An additional element worth reviewing is the ICC’s ongoing demand to introduce a guarantee of confidentiality for the taxpayers they represent into the process, as well as the insinuation that companies must be protected by human rights.
Confidentiality is invoked against the demand for tax transparency, arguing that the dissemination of any type of tax information related to large fortunes or corporate assets could expose their owners to theft, kidnapping, or extortion. First, it is important to note that the idea that tax transparency exposes the rich to kidnapping or theft is absurd: no criminal needs to consult a tax database to identify their victims. What is truly disturbing is not an alleged impact on personal security but the loss of opacity that today allows assets to be hidden and taxes evaded by abusing the network of offshore tax havens and financial centers. It is important to remember that when someone brings up the defense of “confidentiality” and “taxpayers rights” into the debate, their concern is not personal security but rather an attempt to maintain privileges and structures that deepen inequality.
Likewise, it is important to understand that the demand for tax transparency does not seek to expose sensitive data but rather aggregated and standardized information that allows for verification of whether the most powerful economic actors comply with their tax obligations. Once again, fiscal transparency does not jeopardize security but rather strengthens citizen trust, reduces evasion, and limits the ability of multinationals and high-net-worth individuals to hide profits in tax havens. The real “risk” that the rich face with transparency is not physical insecurity, but the loss of tax privileges and secrecy mechanisms that worsen income distribution.
At the same time, from the perspective of large multinational corporations, the defense of confidentiality is a mechanism to perpetuate privileges and hide unfair structures. Cases like LuxLeaks exposed how secret tax rulings allowed more than 300 multinational companies to secure special treatment without the public knowing the terms or being able to evaluate them. The secrecy (“confidentiality”) of such arrangements violates not only democratic accountability but also the principle of equality, by favoring those who already have resources to negotiate confidential terms. A fair international tax architecture is needed to guarantee transparency, with citizen oversight mechanisms, prohibition/regulation of all types of private tax agreements, and clear rules that prevent tax secrecy from becoming synonymous with impunity.