Brussels, 04/11/2013 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 5 November, the European Parliament's economic and financial affairs committee adopted, by 33 votes to 0, with 11 abstentions, the report by George Sabin Cutas (S&D, Romania) backing the European Commission's proposal to extend the scope of the EU directive on administrative cooperation in the fiscal domain (201116/EU) and expand the automatic and compulsory exchange of tax information (AEI) to five new categories of income from 1 January 2015 onwards in order to clamp down on tax fraud.
The Commission's proposal, unveiled in June (see EUROPE 10865) and on which Parliament can only give an opinion, suggests scrapping the reference to a threshold below which a member state can say it doesn't want to receive information from other member states, thus making AEI compulsory in both directions; extends AEI to dividends, capital gains and all other forms of income raised from financial assets and any amount that the bank is required to pay to the account holder (including sales of accounts and account balances); and extends the review in 2017 of the clause on the availability of information to five other categories of income and capital covered by the directive.
The EP rapporteur fully backs the proposal which, combined with the revised savings tax directive and the requirements already set out in the directive on administrative cooperation, should give the EU the widest and most demanding automatic exchange of information system in the world. He says that the drive must be kept up, so AEI can be extended to the whole world, as recommended by the Commission and a number of member states, by ensuring the EU has avant-garde legislation. He suggests improvements to the directive in three areas. For data protection, he says clarity is needed in light of the sensitivity of the subject and recent changes at international level. On bilateral agreements, he says that, once the new directive comes into force, the Commission should be the only body negotiating on AEI with non-EU countries, rather than letting the member states negotiate their own bilateral deals. He says that, if this had been in place in the past, the negotiations with the United States on the FATCA law (see EUROPE 10443) would have been more beneficial to Europe. On resources, he says the EU must mobilise the human, technological and financial resources needed to take account of the quantity and complexity of information to be covered by AEI from 2015 onwards. On penalties, he says the member states should be able to apply appropriate penalties to get the information needed for efficient AEI and prevent bodies from ignoring the new rules.
The Council of Ministers may take account of these suggestions before deciding on the draft directive. Under Article 115 of the EU treaty, a unanimous decision is required. (FG/transl.fl)