Green taxes

What EY can do for you

Governments around the world are increasingly using taxation to achieve their environmental targets. Many countries now offer tax incentives to promote “green” behavior and impose specific levies, duties or energy and environmental taxes to discourage undesirable behavior and to raise revenues.

Your company will need to factor the growing role of environmental taxes, resource efficiency and low-carbon activity incentives into your thinking and modeling when making investment decisions.

While business strategy is adapting rapidly to the continuing development of environmental taxes, sustainability incentives and carbon regimes, the tax department is often not at the table during these discussions. In addition, carbon regimes are relatively new and may not be seen as a tax function.

As energy and environmental taxes continue to increase in importance, EY Global Sustainability Tax Network is ready to serve as a trusted business advisor on issues including to help:

• Reduce the cost of operations: The overall costs of operations can be reduced by ensuring energy and environmental taxes are minimized, strategies are adapted, and reliefs are identified and implemented.
  
• Improve the return on investment (ROI) of sustainability-related projects: By identifying and securing sustainability-related incentives and government funding, the ROI of projects from renewable energy investments to energy efficiency retrofits can be positively impacted.
  
• Mitigate risk: The threat of audit and penalties from an energy tax perspective can be reduced by ensuring all compliance and reporting requirements are met.
  
• Thought leadership: Companies also want to understand how environmental taxes will develop and how they can influence government policies so that they achieve the desired outcomes without causing undue complexity for businesses.