Today, the European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission reached a conclusion in the Fiscalis programme negotiations for improving cross-border cooperation between tax authorities. The Fiscalis programme helps tax authorities in the exchange of information, development of IT tools and common tax audits. This is key to the fight against tax evasion and avoidance as well as help share knowledge and expertise. Fiscalis is part of the Multi-Financial-Framework (MFF) programmes currently being negotiated between the Parliament, Council and Commission.
Rapporteur for this file MEP Sven Giegold, financial and economic policy spokesperson of the Greens/EFA group comments on the successes as follows:
„The best measure against dubious tax practices and to save millions of taxpayers´ money is effective exchange of information. For that reason I am pleased that we, together with the parliamentary negotiation team, improved the initial Commission’s proposal significantly. Despite the fact that progress on key tax files over the last few years has been blocked by certain Member States with vested interests, the cooperation between tax authorities has been a success and must be strengthened.”
“We managed to include a list of priority actions that national tax authorities will need to work on to fight tax evasion and avoidance. These priority actions are directly derived from lessons learned from scandals such as Luxleaks and Panama Papers. The new priority actions will increase the effectiveness of the FiCommiscalis programme.“
“On top of this, an improved evaluation and reporting system will uncover possible shortcomings in the cooperation and exchange between tax authorities and reduce the work on the currently scarcely informative annual reports. Additionally, one of our key demands won is the financing of joint audits of several national tax authorities which are an effective instrument to control tax payments of transnational corporations.”
“On top of the regular exchange between tax authorities we also succeeded to open up the programme to experts of least developed countries which will be instrumental to achieve a global exchange between tax authorities in the long run.”
“What remains open is an agreement on the budget which is being dealt with in the common framework of the MFF. Here we will continue to fight for a spending of about 300 Million Euros during the coming seven 7 year period. This would be 10 percent more than originally foreseen. With this budget and mandate Fiscalis will be a crucial tool in fighting against tax evasion and tax avoidance.”
Letter of acknowledment of Pierre Moscovici:
https://sven-giegold.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/190320_-Courrier-Cssr-to-MEP-Giegold_Fiscalis.pdf