The Council’s national experts will resume their work on Thursday 24 January on the proposal for country by country reporting (CBCR) regarding tax transparency. An opportunity to see if each other’s positions have changed.
As a reminder, the proposal dates back to 2016 and provides that major groups should disclose certain accounting information, such as turnover and taxes paid, and break it down on a country-by-country basis for activities carried out in the European Union and tax havens, and in an aggregated form for activities carried out in the rest of the world (see EUROPE 11530).
Discussions in the Council have been blocked for almost a year. Grounds: the legal basis chosen by the Commission (see EUROPE 11758). Several countries consider that the text should be negotiated as a tax text, unanimously and simply by consulting the European Parliament. However, unanimity of the Member States is required to agree on a change of legal basis.
On Thursday, discussions will take place regarding the basis of a new compromise by the Presidency of the Council of the EU, which in fact updates the compromise established in December 2017 with slight additions resulting from the last meeting of the working group in June 2018 (see EUROPE 12041), where no substantial progress had been made.
It is difficult to predict the outcome of the meeting, according to a European source, who was nevertheless not very optimistic on Friday 18 January.
See the compromise text: https://bit.ly/2Cszdpo. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)