Interactive timeline: Ireland and multinational tax schemes

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s tax reform plan published on Monday represents the first effort in a century to design a new template for global taxation.

Commissioned by the G20 in 2013, in response to the global recession and the view that multinationals were avoiding paying billions of euro annually in corporation tax, the so-called Base Erosion and Profit-Shifting (Beps) project aims to produce a new global template that will better align where a company pays tax, and where it has business substance.

Tax experts say the project is going to close down the use of “Caribbean cashbox-type entities”, legal entities in offshore locations that book massive amounts of multinationals’ profits, but often have few if any employees. Entities such as these are used in the so-called “Double Irish” tax structure, which the Government has announced is to be closed down by 2020.

If you are reading this artilce on the map, see the interactive timeline on irishtimes.com