The Filing India Doesn't Owe

On 30 June 2026, exactly a week from now, multinational groups across more than three dozen jurisdictions will lodge their first GloBE Information Return. It is the most ambitious cross-border tax filing the world has ever attempted. India is not in the queue.

That is not a footnote. It is the single most important fact about Indian international tax this year, and almost nobody is talking about it.

The week the global minimum tax goes live

The OECD's Pillar Two is now operational. The rules apply to multinational groups with consolidated revenues of at least €750 million. If their effective tax rate in any jurisdiction falls below 15%, someone, somewhere, collects a top-up. Roughly 140 jurisdictions joined the inclusive framework back in 2021. Thirty-seven have actually legislated a Qualified Income Inclusion Rule or a Qualified Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax that bites from the 2024 reporting fiscal year.

The OECD was still soldering plumbing in the last weeks before the deadline. On 18 May 2026 it issued a common understanding allowing groups to file centrally in one jurisdiction and avoid duplicate local returns, provided each domestic office gets a notification. That a structural feature of the regime had to be settled eight weeks before the first deadline tells you something about how unfinished this compact still is.

Three countries that stayed away

The United States, China and India have not implemented Pillar Two. The American position is now formal: in January 2026 the US Treasury announced that US-headquartered groups would be exempt, and the OECD's 5 January Side-by-Side package legalised that exit by carving out a safe harbour for groups parented in jurisdictions with ‘eligible’ tax regimes. The US is, as of today, the only jurisdiction on the OECD Central Record with a confirmed Eligible SbS Regime.

India's stance has been quieter, and to my mind more considered. We participated in the framework. We never legislated the rules. We watched.

Why I think the wait was right

Pillar Two is not really a tax. It is a coordination mechanism that exports one country's view of what another country's tax base should be. It is the first time in modern fiscal history that a domestic legislature has been asked to outsource the residual taxing right on profits earned at home to a residence jurisdiction abroad. That deserves more scepticism than it gets in polite international tax conversation.

For India, the cost-benefit was always thin. The corporate rate here is 22%, or 25.17% with surcharge and cess. The concessional rate for new manufacturers is 15% statutory, around 17.16% effective. We are not a low-tax jurisdiction. Pillar Two only matters when you are below the floor; we mostly are not.

The price of joining would have been real. A QDMTT regime to design. A GloBE return architecture to build. A workforce to retrain in jurisdictional ETR computation. Disputes to defend under accounting standards that are not ours. And acceptance that the rules will be rewritten by an OECD working party in which our vote is one among many. None of that grows the base. It expensively confirms what we already collect.

What we still need to claim

The harder side is data. The 2024 GIR is the first time multinational groups will publish, in a standardised XML schema, a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction picture of where their profits arose and what tax those profits paid. Other administrations will receive that file automatically. India, outside the exchange relationships, will not, unless we sign on to receive it. That is a transparency dividend we should be claiming whether or not we ever impose a single rupee of top-up tax.

Soft power is the other piece. The Side-by-Side carve-out is, in effect, a US-only privilege today. The OECD has signalled other jurisdictions may be added. ‘May’ is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. If a future investor's post-tax compliance burden is lighter under a US parent than under an Indian one, we have not lost any revenue, but we have lost a piece of the architecture of who matters in the next decade of international tax rule-writing.

A proposal

The smart move is not to copy Pillar Two. It is to ask for the data, build the analytical capacity, and use the next eighteen months to find out where Indian profit shifting is genuinely costing us revenue. Three concrete steps.

• Sign the GIR Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement. The cost is administrative. The value is a structured view of every in-scope group's worldwide tax footprint, delivered automatically.
• Commission a quiet domestic study of jurisdictional ETRs for India-headquartered MNEs. Two or three years of clean data will tell us whether a future QDMTT would collect ten thousand crore or ten lakh. Right now the number is asserted, not measured.
• Use the Income-Tax Act 2025 transition window to bake in a minimum-tax-compatible computational backbone. If we later choose to switch on a QDMTT, the systems already speak the schema. Building it after a political decision is far more painful than building it now, while the law is still warm.

Pillar Two will either be remembered as the most consequential multilateral tax instrument since the League of Nations drafted the first model treaties in the 1920s, or as a noble experiment that fractured the moment its largest economy walked away. We do not need to guess which today. We need to stay liquid: positioned to step in, positioned to step out, owning the data either way. That is the case for sitting out 30 June with intent.

#PillarTwo #GlobalMinimumTax #IncomeTax #IndianEconomy #TaxPolicy #OECD #InternationalTax

After the Carve-Out, India's Window

Reporting in the New York Times on Friday put a hard number on something tax administrators around the world had been quietly calculating since January: roughly forty billion dollars in US corporate income tax has gone unpaid since the start of 2025 because the Trump administration walked out of the global minimum tax negotiation. Thermo Fisher Scientific alone reportedly shaved $3.5 billion off its tax bill via Malta. American Express, PayPal, Pepsi and others routed earnings through Cyprus, Bermuda, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. The US Treasury took the position on day one of the second Trump term that the OECD's Pillar Two had "no force or effect" in the United States, and in January the OECD blinked.

That is the bare news. The harder question is what countries like India should do now.

What the side-by-side actually did

On 5 January 2026 the OECD Inclusive Framework released the Side-by-Side package. It is not a withdrawal of Pillar Two. In the polite language of international tax it is a structural exemption: US-headquartered multinationals are deemed to satisfy the global minimum tax standard because they are subject to the rebadged GILTI regime, now called Net CFC Tested Income, or NCTI. The Income Inclusion Rule and the Undertaxed Profits Rule will not be applied to them by other jurisdictions for fiscal years beginning on or after 1 January 2026.

The problem, which technical readers know and policymakers are still digesting, is that NCTI does not work the way Pillar Two does. NCTI permits global averaging across jurisdictions. Pillar Two requires a country-by-country effective tax rate at the 15 per cent floor. The two regimes differ by design. Calling NCTI "robust enough" to substitute for Pillar Two is a polite legal fiction, and the empirical evidence is now in. Forty billion dollars in fifteen months is not a rounding error.

India's seat at the table, and the larger irony

India was not a passive bystander in any of this. The OECD's own implementation handbook on the global minimum tax was prepared under the Indian G20 presidency. The G20 finance ministers' communiqué from Rio in July 2024 explicitly urged all jurisdictions to implement the minimum tax. India quietly withdrew its 2 per cent equalisation levy in August 2024 to align with Pillar One and Pillar Two, sacrificing a domestic revenue stream as the price of multilateral consensus.

Eighteen months on, the multilateral consensus has a hole the size of US corporate income in it, and India has neither the equalisation levy nor a domestic minimum tax. That is a bad place to be.

The QDMTT question is now the only question

Within the Pillar Two architecture there is a quietly useful instrument: the Qualified Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax, the QDMTT. It allows a country to impose its own top-up tax on undertaxed profits earned by multinationals operating within its borders, so that the revenue accrues domestically rather than to the parent country. The OECD's own Side-by-Side text reinforces QDMTTs as the principal mechanism for protecting local tax bases, particularly in developing countries.

For India, the case for a QDMTT was always strong. With the US carve-out, it has become close to obvious. If a US-headquartered multinational operates a significant capability centre or manufacturing presence in India and pays an effective rate below 15 per cent because of incentives or transfer pricing arrangements, the choice is straightforward. Either India collects the top-up itself, or it leaves the difference on the table. Under the side-by-side, no other jurisdiction will collect that top-up from a US parent. The money simply disappears.

The Income-tax Act, 2025, which came into force on 1 April this year, is the cleanest vehicle in which to introduce a QDMTT. The Act was designed as a generational rewrite. Slotting in a domestic minimum tax now, while the architecture is still fresh and the rules are being shaped, is administratively far easier than retrofitting later.

A closing argument from inside administration

The instinct of every tax administration when global rules get watered down is to wait and see. That instinct is wrong here. The signal from January is not that Pillar Two is dying. It is that Pillar Two will survive in a fragmented form, and the countries that move first on domestic top-ups will keep their taxing rights intact. Those that wait will discover, two budget cycles from now, that revenues have leaked through a perfectly legal door.

There is a quieter argument as well. India's credibility in international tax forums was built on two decades of substantive contribution. Walking away from that posture because the United States walked away first would be the wrong lesson. The right lesson is that multilateralism, when it cracks, is best repaired by countries who take the rule and apply it at home, not by countries who wait for the rule to be restored from above.

A domestic minimum tax of fifteen per cent on large multinationals, implemented through the new Act with the standard €750 million revenue threshold, would do four things at once. It would protect the domestic tax base. It would signal continuity of India's commitment to the BEPS framework. It would give Indian-headquartered groups a level playing field with US-headquartered ones. And it would, frankly, put forty billion dollars back on the table as a question other countries have to answer for themselves.

The carve-out is done. The window for the response is open. The next budget is the place to take it.

#IncomeTax #PillarTwo #BEPS #GlobalMinimumTax #IndianTaxation #PublicFinance #InternationalTax #CBDT