The EU is increasingly realising the importance of closing the tax gaop across Europe to ensure public services can be maintained. As EuroPolitics has reported:
Tackling tax fraud and harmful competition is increasingly important to help resolve the economic crisis that continues to plague the Union, according to Taxation Commissioner Algirdas Semeta. He reiterated, on 17 September, that the Commission would strive to “ensure progress” on the issue of savings taxation. By year's end it will present proposals “for concrete actions” to bring tax havens into line.
Semeta welcomed the comments made by Commission President José Manuel Barroso in his ‘State of the Union' address to the European Parliament, on 12 September.
“Stopping tax fraud and tax evasion could put extra billions into the public purse across Europe,” said Barroso. “This is why the Commission will fight for an agreement on the revised Savings Tax Directive, and on mandates to negotiate stronger savings tax agreements with third countries,” namely Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Andorra, San Marino and Monaco.
“If we succeeded in working out a good agreement with the Swiss, member states could collect taxes much more effectively and solve certain budget consolidation problems,” observed Semeta.
Absolutely right.
The obstacles are the governments of Luxembourg and Austria, both of whom are going out of their way to support and promote tax crime: I can be as unsubtle as that.
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This will end up with the UK totally isolated. That’s appropriate as while the evil empire, the financial empire which has rolled out across the world and hold sway over it, was conceived in what we now call Holland it took root and grew here. It began here, and I predict it’ll end here. Interestingly, changing subjects a little, while Disraeli would have us believe it was George Downing who bought ‘Dutch finance’ over here Swift, the author, firmly attributed this to a chap call Gilbert about whom I can find little except no-one trusted him as he talked too much. Google is putting more and more ancient texts online now (did you know Schacht’s The Magic of Money – translated version – is available online for free now?) and increasingly it’s possible to research these things.
That is incorrect. The core issue is about automatic exchange of information; the Commission wants to impose it, but Austria and Luxembourg say nein!, and have done so since 2008.
Austria and Luxembourg would however be perfectly happy to live with an improved version of the current withholding regime. It would have the same impact in terms of revenue generation as automatic exchange, but possibly at a much lower administrative cost.
Most observes agree that some extension of the withholding regime is the only way out of the current negotiating impasse. That is the position supported by Mark Morris, who Murphy regularly hails as the guru of all things related to the savings directive.
If Semeta was genuinely interested in improving revenue collection and closing the tax gap, he would have long ago done a deal with Austria and Luxembourg. Instead, he has allowed himself to be side-lined to the point of becoming irrelevant.
” Austria and Luxembourg would however be perfectly happy to live with an improved version of the current withholding regime. ”
That’s supporting crime.
And Morris simply sees extending witholding as the next stage to automatic information exchange