On Thursday 25 May, MEPs on the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs examined the amendments to the report by Rasmus Andresen (Greens/EFA, German) on the revision of the Directive on administrative cooperation in the field of taxation (DAC8). They regretted the fact that the Council of the EU had reached an agreement at the last ‘Ecofin’ Council (see EUROPE 13183/1) without waiting for their report to be finalised. In their view, this revision, which includes crypto-assets within its scope, could have been more ambitious.
“The Council has already decided, in its own terms, how the vision of the directive should look. They [the ministers] are not respecting the competences of the different institutions”, commented Lídia Pereira (EPP, Portuguese). “It’s not a lack of respect for the rules, because they do have competence of this subject, but it’s a lack of respect for this institution”, she added. In her view, this decision “takes away legitimacy, and authoritativeness from a directive, which could have been much more ambitious”.
For Pedro Marques (S&D, Portuguese), this situation means that “we can be a little more ambitious at this stage”, because “this new report will be used for the Commission’s next initiative”.
Kira Marie Peter-Hansen (Greens/EFA, Danish), who represented Mr Andresen in his absence, informed her colleagues that Mr Andresen had asked the economic coordinators and the Chair to send a letter to the Council and the Commission, “reminding them that the Council should refrain from finding political agreements before the Parliament’s opinion was issued”.
With regard to the amendments, Ms Pereira stressed the importance of protecting taxpayers’ data and privacy by securing information exchange infrastructures.
“When there are breaches of the MiCA regulation [which governs crypto-assets], the penalties need to be strong and dissuasive. And we need to avoid a situation where tax authorities take a discretionary approach”, she felt. Like Andżelika Anna Możdżanowska (CRE, Polish), she also talked about reducing the bureaucratic burdens on businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises.
Furthermore, Ms Możdżanowska stressed the importance of the tax identification number (NIF or TIN), as did Belgium (see EUROPE 13180/24). “We need a standard form for Member States to use the European Tax Identification System”, she said. This point was opposed by Martin Hlaváček(Renew Europe, Czech), represented by his compatriot Ondřej Kovařík.
Mr Marques, for his part, wanted to broaden the scope of declarable income that must be exchanged to ensure that “all tax rulings for our net worth individuals are shared”, and to prevent “some sort of tax competition between the different regimes of the Member States”.
The report will be put to the vote in the ECON Commission at the end of June, then to the plenary session in September.
Read the amendments: https://aeur.eu/f/72w (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)