Directive 2021/514 - Amendment of Directive 2011/16/EU on administrative cooperation in the field of taxation - Main contents

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

L 104/1

In order to accommodate new initiatives of the Union in the field of tax transparency, Council Directive 2011/16/EU (3) has been the subject of a series of amendments over recent years. Those changes mainly introduced reporting obligations, followed by a communication to other Member States, related to financial accounts, advance cross-border rulings and advance pricing arrangements, country-by-country reports and reportable cross-border arrangements. Those amendments thus extended the scope of the automatic exchange of information. The tax authorities of Member States now have a broader set of cooperation tools at their disposal, to detect and tackle forms of tax fraud, tax evasion and tax avoidance.

In recent years, the Commission has been monitoring the application, and, in 2019, completed an evaluation, of Directive 2011/16/EU. While significant improvements have been made in the field of automatic exchange of information, there is still a need to improve provisions that relate to all forms of exchanges of information and administrative cooperation.

Pursuant to Article 5 of Directive 2011/16/EU, the requested authority is to communicate to the requesting authority any information it has in its possession, or that it obtains as a result of administrative enquiries, which is foreseeably relevant to the administration and enforcement of the domestic laws of Member States concerning the taxes falling within the scope of that Directive. To ensure the effectiveness of the exchanges of information and to prevent unjustified refusals of requests, as well as to provide legal certainty for both tax administrations and taxpayers, the internationally agreed standard of foreseeable relevance should be clearly delineated and codified.

There is sometimes a need for addressing requests for information that concern groups of taxpayers who cannot be identified individually and the foreseeable relevance of the requested information can rather only be described on the basis of a common set of characteristics. Considering this, tax administrations should continue using group requests for information under a clear legal framework.

It is important that Member States exchange information related to income derived from intellectual property, as this area of the economy is prone to profit shifting arrangements due to its highly mobile underlying assets. Therefore, royalties as defined in point (b) of Article 2 of Council Directive 2003/49/EC (4) should be included in the categories of income subject to mandatory automatic exchange of information in order to strenghten the fight against tax fraud, tax evasion and tax avoidance. Member States should make every possible and reasonable effort to include the tax identification number (TIN) of residents issued by the Member State of residence in the communication of the categories of income and capital subject to mandatory automatic exchange of information.

The digitalisation of the economy has been growing rapidly over recent years. This has given rise to an increasing number of complex situations linked to...