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In the first eight months of 2026 the international tax framework moved in several directions at once. Public country-by-country reporting will reach its first publication deadline in December, while Brussels has proposed to prune the reporting architecture it spent a decade building. The global minimum tax now comes with a permanent safe harbour for groups parented in one qualifying jurisdiction, and a lawful national tax has been characterised as grounds for a hundred per cent tariff. Each of these developments is defensible on its own terms; together they contradict each other, and there is no reason to expect a coherent settlement on any timescale a company can plan around. We believe this turns tax from a technical problem into an organisational one, and that the right response is not more technical firepower but tax governance: an agreement, reached while conditions are calm, about how an organisation will decide when they are not. This article sets out why, and what a working set of decision rules returns to an organisation that has one: time, and quiet.
This article was written by Mario van den Broek (mvdbroek@rsmnl.nl) and Dick Brinkhof (dbrinkhof@rsmnl.nl). Mario and Dick are senior tax consultants with RSM Netherlands with a focus on international tax and tax governance.
What is happening? A tax landscape at odds with itself
Anyone trying to explain the current state of international tax to a board will find that the explanation keeps contradicting itself. Four developments from this year illustrate the point.
First, transparency is expanding and contracting at the same time. At the end of this year the first public income tax information reports under Directive (EU) 2021/2101 become due across the European Union: for most calendar-year groups above the EUR 750 million threshold, the report over financial year 2025 must be published by 31 December 2026, with the board responsible for what is published and for reasoning any omission. Six months before that deadline, on 24 June 2026, the European Commission proposed a tax simplification package that would trim the reporting estate it had spent a decade constructing, including an exemption from DAC6 for groups already within the scope of Pillar Two. In between, the sustainability reporting regime that tax transparency is often bracketed with was substantially narrowed, so that a number of companies will fall out of one disclosure regime while remaining firmly inside the other.
Second, a global minimum tax now applies globally, except where it does not. The side-by-side package agreed at the OECD in January 2026 gives groups parented in a qualifying jurisdiction a permanent safe harbour from the two principal charging rules; for the moment, one jurisdiction qualifies. Two groups with identical operations, margins and effective tax rates can be treated differently because of where their parent is incorporated. Whatever the practical merits, the premise of a common minimum has been amended by political agreement among a small group of states.
Third, multilateralism is being rebuilt in one room and unpicked in another. Through August, negotiators at the United Nations worked line by line on a framework convention on international tax cooperation, a process aimed at 2027 and driven substantially by states that felt underweighted in two decades of OECD consensus-building. It is difficult to read that alongside events at the OECD and conclude that anyone knows where authority over international tax rules will sit in five years.
Fourth, tax has stopped being a purely fiscal instrument. In June the President of the United States stated that any country introducing a digital services tax would face a hundred per cent tariff on its goods, naming Section 301 of the Trade Act as the mechanism. Set aside how enforceable that is; the proposition it contains is that a lawful exercise of national taxing power is now a trade provocation.
It would be comforting to treat all this as turbulence that will settle. We do not think it will, because these contradictions are not administrative failures. They are the visible surface of something more durable: tax has become an instrument of industrial policy, competitiveness policy and foreign policy at the same time, and those three want different things. A simplification agenda is a competitiveness measure, a public reporting obligation is an accountability measure, and a negotiated safe harbour is a diplomatic measure. Each is defensible; together they point in different directions. The instability is the condition, not the interruption.
What is the potential impact?
The effect inside a tax function is not primarily that there is more work, although there is. It is that the ground under previous decisions keeps shifting, and every shift reopens questions that were considered settled. A position taken on an election two years ago now sits under a safe harbour that did not exist when it was taken. A reporting process built with care in 2020 may be exempted in 2029, or may not, depending on unanimity among twenty-seven member states. An ordinary holding structure may become expensive because of a trade dispute in which the group is a bystander. None of these is a technical failure, yet all of them consume the same scarce resource: the attention of the few people who understand the group's position well enough to reassess it.
When the framework moves faster than an organisation can absorb, decisions start being taken reactively, under time pressure, by whoever happens to be available and willing to carry the responsibility. Positions get taken because a filing date arrives rather than because anyone weighed them, and reasoning that was once carefully considered is never recorded, so it has to be reconstructed later by people who were not there. The compliance risk in a volatile environment therefore does not mainly come from aggressive planning. It comes from rushed decisions taken by the wrong people at the wrong moment, in conditions where nobody had time to ask whether this was theirs to decide.
The instinctive response is to do more of what tax functions are good at: analyse harder, monitor more closely, write it up. Each has a failure mode in this environment. The technical memorandum answers one question, in one case, under one state of the law, and its half-life is now shorter than the time it takes to write. Monitoring everything is the mirror-image failure: some of the costlier decisions of the past two years were taken by organisations that read an announced simplification as a reason to stop maintaining an obligation still in force. And waiting until the dust settles is itself a decision, taken by default and owned by nobody.
Supervisors are already looking at organisations through this lens. The Dutch tax administration calibrates the intensity of its supervision of large businesses to the demonstrated quality of tax control and transparency. A practical example of where the bar now lies comes from a 2024 enforcement file in which the Dutch central bank gave a formal direction to a trust office: it held that a list of factual circumstances is not a risk analysis, that recommending an ethical debate is not a control measure, and that an outdated tax opinion does not establish the purpose of a structure. The common thread is that regulators are no longer asking whether one position was right. They are asking whether the organisation could see what it was doing: who was entitled to decide, on what basis, and where the reasoning can be found. An organisation that cannot answer those three questions is exposed even when every technical position it holds turns out to be correct.
This is what tax governance, properly understood, addresses. It is not a control catalogue and not a maturity model; it is deliberately thin on content and deliberately firm on authority, because content is what keeps changing and authority is what does not have to. What it settles in advance is who is entitled to decide a given kind of question, on what basis that judgement will be made, and where the reasoning will be recorded so the next person can find it. What a working set of rules returns is time, because the debate about who decides stops happening and ordinary cases stop climbing the escalation ladder out of caution, and quiet, because an organisation that has settled where its limits lie can place a new proposal against an existing framework and determine in an afternoon whether anything actually needs to change.
Forward thinking
The useful first move is not another implementation project but a conversation, held once and properly, about three questions that have nothing to do with technique. Which decisions in your organisation are actually taken by the person who ought to be taking them? What would you keep doing if the obligation that prompted it were withdrawn tomorrow, which the simplification agenda will shortly make a live question rather than a hypothetical one? And if a supervisor asked next month how a particular position came about, where would the answer be found? None of this requires knowing how the international framework will resolve, which is fortunate, because nobody does.
RSM is a thought leader in the field of supply chain management including international tax. We provide frequent insights through training and thought leadership, based on detailed knowledge of industry developments and practical application gained from working with our clients. RSM helps companies connect individual geopolitical and regulatory developments to the broader changes affecting their supply chains. By doing so, we support businesses in distinguishing short-term disruption from structural change and translating that assessment into coordinated decisions on sourcing, origin, landed cost, logistics and supply-chain design. If you would like to discuss what these connected developments mean for your business, please contact one of our consultants.
This is a publication that is part of RSM’s the Voice of SCM. On a monthly basis, RSM issues the Voice of Supply Chain Management (SCM). Our SCM consultants constantly follow global SCM developments in an everchanging changing society and translate their impact into practical considerations for internationally active companies.
