Kuwait moves closer to new tax reporting rules for big firms

If you run the finance or tax team for a multinational company with operations in Kuwait, a quiet but important change is heading your way. It won’t affect your salary or your residency paperwork, but it could change how your company reports its profits and taxes to the government.

Kuwait has just taken two steps that tax experts say point clearly towards new tax reporting rules for large multinational groups. According to KPMG, Kuwait has approved the CbC MCAA (the Country-by-Country Reporting Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement) and has also gone through an OECD 2026 Peer Review. Together, these two moves signal that Kuwait is preparing to introduce its own domestic Country-by-Country Reporting, or CbCR, rules.

What is CbCR and why does it matter?

Country-by-Country Reporting is a system where large multinational groups must tell tax authorities where they make their profits, where they pay tax, and where they actually do business, country by country. The idea, pushed by the OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is to stop big companies from shifting profits to low-tax countries on paper while doing little real business there.

The CbC MCAA is the legal agreement that allows countries to exchange these reports with each other automatically. By approving it, Kuwait is putting itself in a better position to both receive this information from other countries and, eventually, require its own companies to produce it.

The OECD 2026 Peer Review is a separate but related process. It checks whether a country’s rules and systems for CbCR meet the international standard. Kuwait going through this review is, according to KPMG, a clear sign that domestic rules are coming, even though the exact scope, start date and filing requirements have not been announced yet.

So who does this actually affect?

This mainly affects multinational enterprise (MNE) groups, large companies that operate in more than one country, including those with a presence in Kuwait. Smaller local businesses and individual residents are very unlikely to be affected directly. If you work for a global company’s Kuwait office, or in a finance, tax or compliance role for one, this is the kind of development you’ll want your head office or tax advisers to be tracking.

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