The proposed amendment would result in multinational corporations having to disclose where they do business, the money made and the tax paid in each country.

The proposal comes from a cross party group of MPs and follows an earlier unsuccessful attempt to allow for the public disclosure of follow county-by-country reporting in June.

Rebecca Reading, tax partner at RSM said: ‘This latest proposed amendment seeks to remedy the drafting defects. On the question of disadvantaging UK-based businesses, since the earlier attempt there have been further significant developments globally in the drive to implement the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) reforms,a package of measures (including country-by-country reporting to be shared between tax authorities) designed to promote tax coherence and clamp down on avoidance by multinationals.

‘One of the most significant developments has been in the US, where the US Treasury and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released their finalised country-by-country reporting rules at the end of June. These closely follow the OECD’s original recommendations and state that US companies will not be required to put key tax data in the public domain. The IRS made it quite clear that country-by-country reports will not be shared with any country that poses a threat to confidentiality.

‘While the UK Government has previously stated that public country-by-country reporting would come eventually and that the UK would seek to promote this internationally, there is a danger that if the UK breaks rank on this issue now, particularly at a time of strained relationships following the Apple ruling, the resulting confrontation with US lawmakers could make it harder for the pieces of the BEPS puzzle to fall into place.’