On Wednesday 12 July, six MEPs co-signed a letter to Mairead McGuinness, the Financial Services Commissioner, criticising her for seeking to limit the possible willingness of Member States to extend the scope of the directive aimed at increasing public country-by-country reporting (CbCR) (see EUROPE 12832/24). They debated the issue at a plenary session in Strasbourg on Thursday 13 July.
“It has come to our attention that the Commission proactively approached Member States with an information letter on gold plating, without informing the European Parliament”, they wrote. They are concerned that the Commission’s letter may limit the information that Member States are willing to provide for the purposes of drawing up CbCR.
“Certainly, we understand the underlying concerns about a possible fragmentation of European markets if this directive is not properly transposed”, they conceded. However, they are convinced “that this market fragmentation will occur particularly if the future common templates and machine-readable formats to be used by companies under national legislation are not adequately enforced”.
Interviewed by EUROPE on Friday 14 July, Evelyn Regner (S&D, Austrian), the text’s rapporteur, highlighted the Commission’s contradictory attitude. “Only ten Member States have implemented the directive, so the Commission should be giving guidance to the vast majority to do better, rather than encouraging countries not to do too much”, she pointed out. The deadline for implementation was Thursday 22 June, and only Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Spain, France, Lithuania, Hungary and Romania met the deadline.
The Commissioner gave some explanations during the debate. “The Commission aims to prevent Member States from imposing unjustified obligations that go beyond the legislation or that could disrupt the level playing field”, she said. “The paper identified only a limited number of areas of concern, and there were three: the scope of application, the content of a company’s report and the audit requirement for subsidiaries”, she added.
“We will do our utmost to ensure that the 17 Member States are more active on this important piece of legislation and implement it fully and effectively”, she added.
“It is less a question of content than of constitutional overshooting. We want to shed light on what the Commission’s internal departments are doing”, explained Ms Regner. She also mentioned the revision clause, which is due to expire soon.
Read the MEPs’ letter: https://aeur.eu/f/837 (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)