DNB (Dutch Central Bank) issued on July 2 2019 a Guideline entitled “Good practices tax integrity risks at clients of banks” (Good practices fiscale integriteitsrisico’s bij cliënten van banken). The Financieel Dagblad (Dutch financial newspaper) published an article on August 7 on the topic. The editor’s comment in the August 8 paper concludes this is…

Introduction. I have been actively supporting an EU based corporate income tax to reflect the single internal market rather than a fragmented framework with 28 competing tax laws. I’ve done so since the early 1990’s, after the publication of the Ruding Report (following earlier proposals by eg. Van den Tempel).  The CCCTB approach as introduced…

The EU Commission and EU Parliament want to settle for nothing less than public country-by-country-reporting, in direct conflict with G20 BEPS adoption resolution. For many good reasons, business in Europe is opposed to such publication. I do not need to dwell on the arguments here. These are widely available. My interest has been piqued by…

The 1999 Simmons & Simmons report on administrative practices is now public, together with the responses by Member States. My suspicion was correct: France had reason to keep the documents a secret. Let me explain. On 22 April, 2015, I published on this a site a blog titled: “A mysterious study in the Code of…

On August 5, 2015 Grant Thornton (GT) published their annual International Business Report, a global “mid market survey covering more than 10,000 companies in 35 economies”. Unfortunately, their website only provides summaries;  the full report relating to tax is not available on the site. It appears a sensible assumption the mid market companies surveyed engage in cross…

Let’s go back a few weeks, to March 18, 2015. The EU Commission announces its much heralded Tax Transparency package. The package contains a surprise element: the link to the Code of Conduct Report of 1999. To refresh memories: this report, lead by a UK national, contained 66 harmful tax measures. The 66 could be…