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Changing of the Guard: Ex-BIAC Tax Chair Reflects on Tenure

Posted on Jan. 12, 2022

The voice of business is going to sound a bit different in 2022 now that Will Morris, the longtime chair of the tax committee at Business at OECD (BIAC), has stepped down from his post.

Before ending his nine-year run as chair on January 1, Morris sat down with Tax Notes in person on December 3, 2021, to reflect on his experiences leading the international business community through some of the OECD’s biggest projects — and witnessing tax history in the process.

“I’ve had the enormous privilege of this ringside seat. There are huge advantages to sitting next to the ring. Occasionally, things fall out of the ring at you as well,” said Morris.

Over the years, Morris has become the international tax equivalent of a household name, speaking for corporate taxpayers amid spirited global tax policy debates. A U.K. national turned U.S. citizen, Morris’s career covers stints at law firms starting in the late 1980s, nearly two years as attorney-adviser at the IRS in the mid-1990s, about three years at Treasury as associate international tax counsel in the late 1990s, and a 17-year stretch as director of global tax policy at GE starting in May 2000. He took up his current post as deputy global tax policy leader at PwC in April 2017, following a reorganization agreement between GE and PwC.

Aside from his involvement with BIAC, Morris also holds tax leadership roles within other business confederations, including the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU, the European Tax Policy Forum, and the United States Council for International Business (USCIB). He had served as tax committee chair for the Confederation of British Industry from 2010 to 2016.

As if his résumé weren't impressive enough, Morris is also a part-time priest affiliated with St. John’s Church in Washington’s Lafayette Square.

Morris became chair of the BIAC tax committee in November 2012. Incidentally, that was the same month France, Germany, and the United Kingdom urged other G-20 governments to back the OECD’s base erosion and profit-shifting project to tackle aggressive corporate tax avoidance, he recalled.

Shortly afterward, the BEPS project began with the goal of tightening up corporate tax rules through 15 different action areas, including addressing the tax challenges of the digital economy (action 1).

That project ultimately led to a two-pillar plan for giving the international tax system a much-needed makeover. The plan, which nearly 140 countries finally endorsed in October 2021, calls for the partial reallocation of residual profits to the countries in which the largest multinational enterprises have consumers. It also provides for global corporate minimum taxation. Both parts of the plan — dubbed pillar 1 and pillar 2, respectively — build on action 1.

Through it all, Morris has been a steady hand at the helm, acting as a liaison between the international business community and the OECD as governments sought to rewrite the tax rules for a modern, globalized economy.

“I stayed on honestly a little longer than I thought I was going to and probably a little beyond my term in order to see out the digital project,” Morris said. “At a certain point I said, ‘OK, you know, I think we need to move this on. It needs new blood.’”

That new blood is Alan McLean, executive vice president of taxation and controller at Shell, who is now chair of the BIAC tax committee. However, Morris remains active on the group’s bureau, serving as chair emeritus to help ensure that the OECD hears companies’ concerns and their advice as governments move to implement the new rules.

BIAC is an independent international business confederation that regularly advises OECD government policymakers in nearly 40 areas, including tax. Its membership includes USCIB, the Confederation of British Industry, Mouvement des Entreprises de France, Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie in Germany, and Keidanren in Japan. All BIAC member groups work together on a consensus basis to form common positions on issues to communicate to the OECD — a task that requires committee chairs to balance different perspectives, according to Morris. “Maybe 50 years ago I’d have become a diplomat,” he said. “I actually quite like trying to pull people to a common position.”

That wasn’t always easy, given how contentious both the BEPS project and the two-pillar project could be at times, Morris said. Despite stakeholders having different views on pillar 1 and pillar 2, BIAC was able to send in consensus-based comments, he added. “It's important to say, ‘Actually, business does care about this,’ and to stop this being about one sector being against another sector,” he said. Morris also said he enjoyed acting as a communication bridge between business groups with different positions on tax issues.

When approaching such conundrums, Morris recalled advice he received during his time at Treasury. His boss at the time, Treasury Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Donald C. Lubick, had told him there are two ways to negotiate a common position in a group: Either you tackle the big issues first and risk getting stuck on those, or you find common ground where you can on smaller issues and set aside the topics on which there is no agreement. “At some point, if you agree on enough of the small things, it will make the big things easier to agree on. And he was right,” Morris said.

Morris has followed that advice — although it doesn’t always work, especially when it comes to particularly difficult issues. “But if you try and find out what the common points are . . . then actually you can quite often get to that consensus,” he said. Lubick’s advice has been particularly useful at the BIAC tax committee because it brings together stakeholders that wouldn’t otherwise have much in common, according to Morris.

McLean has seen Morris’s ability to bridge differences in opinion firsthand. “Will’s approach of starting with the key policy principles and then working through the detailed proposals has allowed the tax committee to remain focused throughout the marathon and to achieve a remarkable degree of consensus on the most important points,” McLean told Tax Notes. Moreover, Morris’s patience and willingness to work through issues on which BIAC members had different opinions have been invaluable, he added. “Will has always had a great network to draw on and strong relationships with OECD as well as OECD member country treasury and tax authority staff that he devoted a lot of time to maintaining and improving, and that has helped in ensuring that the voice of Business at OECD was heard where it mattered most,” McLean said.

Talking the Talk

BIAC is a group that doesn’t work unless people get together to talk, Morris said. While the group has managed to keep things going using virtual means during the pandemic, it’s critical to get people in a room to exchange views and have coffee break conversations, he added.

BIAC’s tax committee members finally got that chance on November 5, 2021, when they had a physical meeting at OECD headquarters in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. Morris said he was thrilled to finally be able to speak with colleagues in person — but it turned out everyone had a lot to say.

By that time, the two-pillar global tax reform project was running hot. The Task Force on the Digital Economy, Working Party 11 on aggressive tax avoidance, and the inclusive framework were working full steam ahead on the two-pillar project to secure a final political agreement by October 2021. But business stakeholders felt left out in the cold, having had little interaction with the OECD since the last public consultations in January 2021. And they were not happy, to say the least.

“One of the interesting things of this in-person meeting was that I think people felt able, in person — at least with me — to be much more angry than they would have been on a Zoom call, and there was genuine anger and frustration at the lack of consultation and the position in which we found ourselves,”Morris explained. “So I said, ‘OK, well, I'll communicate that.’ And I’m glad I did.”

That anger was palpable in a letter Morris sent to the OECD after the meeting. The missive warned that if the OECD does not reengage with business stakeholders as the technical aspects of the new rules are finalized, then governments will risk implementing unworkable tax rules, leading to instability and uncertainty. Sending that letter was important because the OECD secretariat and governments were so focused on reaching political agreement on the reforms, according to Morris.

Certainly, there are key differences between the original BEPS project and the two-pillar project. BEPS 1.0 was organized into 15 action items that allowed for a more orderly, manageable consultation process with businesses and other stakeholders, according to Morris. Only G-20 and OECD countries were involved in standard setting, he added.

According to Morris, the project also had a different narrative: that corporate income was either undertaxed or untaxed. All governments stood to win, which made them a bit more relaxed about the policies and more prepared to listen to business input about how to make them work, he said.

The two-pillar project, on the other hand, was not divided into manageable pieces. It also involves both developed and developing countries, and the new rules will mean that some governments will win, while others will lose, Morris observed. As a result, the OECD secretariat and some of the larger countries have been a lot more focused on getting countries on board with the two pillars and had less time for business stakeholders, he added.

“That was never an issue in BEPS — everybody was pretty much on the same page,” Morris said. “It's meant that there’s been a lot less time for business in this process.”

In his letter, Morris called the last several months “an aberration.” Despite the extremely ambitious 2023 effective date for both pillars, Morris said he remains optimistic that business stakeholders and the OECD will be able to restore their relationship so that companies can again advise policymakers on how to make the new rules mesh with the practicalities of everyday business.

“I'm hopeful that we'll come to a better place on both of these,” Morris said, adding that the next step is to create workable laws, regulations, and dispute resolution processes. “That, in some sense, can't be rushed and can't be papered over.”

Walking the Walk

Change is imminent with the two-pillar project’s implementation, but then again, the global tax environment has been shifting for some time. “I think we as business — and this is where I have pushed very gently — have to acknowledge that things are not the way they were 20 years ago. They're not the way they were 10 years ago,” Morris said.

Globalization and digitalization have not only changed how businesses operate but also reshaped public perceptions about their operations, according to Morris. Underpinning that transformation are concerns about jobs and job security, and growing inequality among individuals and businesses, he added. The rise of social media has also changed the way people communicate, as well as their perceptions, he said.

Businesses, therefore, must lean into those changes, according to Morris. “If you're not on the same page, or working along the same lines as your customers, your suppliers, and importantly your employees, then things aren't going to go right,” he said, adding that society works better when business is integrated with the society around it.

Transparency is also growing in importance, with governments, the media, and the public taking a greater interest in corporate taxation and doing sophisticated data mining to draw conclusions about those companies’ tax affairs, according to Morris.

Businesses can no longer rely on a “cone of silence” when it comes to taxation, Morris said, adding that most companies actually have a good story to tell about their tax affairs. “But they need to tell it,” he said. “If you don't tell it, chances are at this point somebody else is going to tell it for you.”

The trend toward greater corporate responsibility is playing out at the OECD. When Morris first started at BIAC, the OECD had just updated its guidelines for MNEs. The guidelines, first adopted in 1976, are nonbinding principles and standards for responsible business conduct in the countries in which MNEs operate.

“Now they're being reexamined, and I'm absolutely certain that tax will play a much larger role in that than they did even the last time,” Morris said. “These issues around transparency around trust — around rebuilding trust — have been, I think, rightly elevated.”

Building trust between businesses, governments, and the public, especially in the wake of the pandemic, is complicated but essential, according to Morris. To that end, the OECD has started to look at the possibilities that environmental, social, and governance measures — popularly known as ESG — have to offer, he added.

While the environmental aspect of ESG is probably less important for tax right now, there’s plenty in the social and governance spaces for companies to contemplate, according to Morris. The social part of ESG is about building up trust between a business and the public in the countries in which it operates, such as through increased transparency about companies’ tax strategies. Governance, meanwhile, is about how a company runs its operations. ESG will not only help facilitate public trust in businesses but also allow businesses to really understand their own operations, he added.

“Probably the next big thing is going to be ESG, and I think Alan will take charge of that and move it forward,” Morris said.

Morris said his proudest accomplishment during his time as BIAC’s tax committee chair was that throughout the BEPS project and the two-pillar project, the committee has been able to maintain consensus, despite divergent business concerns and views.

Some things in the two-pillar project, "under different circumstances, could have set people at each other's throats,” Morris said. “There are huge winners and losers in this, and that could have gotten very ugly, but it hasn't, and I'm really grateful for that.”

Any regrets? Not really, says Morris. “A little more quiet time would have been nice. It has been desperately exciting,” he said, adding that he wished there weren't a pandemic.

“And I wish there had been more opportunity on this project for us, without a pandemic, to interact more so that we could have all worked together more closely,” Morris said. “But we are where we are. And I think under the circumstances, it wasn't so bad, and now I hope it'll get better.”

As the two-pillar project continues, Morris’s last piece of advice for businesses as BIAC’s tax chair is simple: Stay involved.

“Explain how these rules are going to impact you, how they can be made to work — not why they don't work, or why they shouldn't work, or why you made a stupid policy call, or anything like that,” Morris said. “How can you make them work? And bring your practical and technical expertise to the table . . . but offer it in the sense of providing a solution. I think that's really important.”

End of an Era

By all accounts, Morris will be missed as chair of BIAC’s tax committee. “Will started as chair around the time I started as director, and we immediately established a close and trusting relationship,” Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD’s Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, told Tax Notes. “He has always been helpful [in] making business views understood by policymakers and policy objectives understood by business. He likes bringing people together — and not only on tax, as everyone knows.”

Certainly, it’s evident how much Morris enjoys interacting face-to-face with others, whether it’s during a public consultation at OECD headquarters in Paris or after Sunday service at St. John’s. “Life is about relating to people,” Morris said.

Despite the change in title, it appears that Morris will continue to be a major player in international tax policy. For its part, USCIB looks forward to his continued involvement in helping to lead the group’s tax committee, according to USCIB Vice President and International Tax Counsel Rick Minor.

BIAC’s tax committee has greatly benefited not only from Morris’s insights but also his “international tax cultural intelligence,” which he has cultivated through his unique blend of experience in the private sector and in government over the years, Minor added.

“When Will talks, the tax world listens,” Minor said. “Through the chairmanship, he established his public credibility over time, which I believe gave him the comfort to take stronger positions vis-à-vis the OECD to the benefit of BIAC members. I don’t expect him to be any less influential outside of the chairmanship.”

Morris has also been able to manage the tax committee’s often difficult agenda calmly and decisively, with great humility and respect for the groups’ members and the overarching goal of doing the right thing for the business sector as a whole, McLean said. “He always made time for us, despite his extremely busy professional and personal agenda,” he added.

“We will miss him as our chair but will be glad to have the advantage of his expertise and experience in his role of chair emeritus,” McLean said. “On a personal level, I look forward to benefiting from his thoughtfulness, graciousness, and humor at the committee table, as well as at the dinner and breakfast table in Paris and elsewhere, for some time to come.”

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