AMSTERDAM: New EU plans to force governments to send quarterly reports on tax rulings are a “revolutionary” step towards overcoming corporate secrecy, the bloc’s tax commissioner said.
The blueprint published two weeks ago by the Commission would establish a system of automatic exchange of information on tax rulings and require national authorities to send each other short reports every three months. The current rules allow governments to refuse to exchange information.
Speaking at a hearing of the European Parliament’s special committee on tax rulings, taxation commissioner Pierre Moscovici described the proposal as “a first step towards more transparent and fairer taxation in the EU”.
The Commission believes that creating more ‘peer pressure’ by requiring member states to be more transparent in their tax rulings would create a “virtuous circle” between states and companies. However, critics have complained that the new plan would not require controversial tax rulings to be published, meaning that the public will still remain in the dark.
The EU executive is currently investigating whether so-called ‘sweetheart’ tax agreements in Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, involving Apple, Starbucks and Fiat, constitute illegal subsidies.
The creation of the Parliament committee was prompted by the LuxLeaks scandal which indicated that a host of companies had benefited from a variety of tax avoidance schemes set up in Luxembourg while the current European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, was prime minister.
