April 10, 2015

Report on European Tax Forum, Barcelona March 27th

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The Tax forum was held on Friday March 27th in Barcelona, Spain. 20 delegates from our European members, representing France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Cyprus and Ireland were present.

During a joint session with the Audit Forum, Dr José Rozas, PhD in law at the University of Barcelona held his speech about “Taxes in the Boardroom”. The purpose of the speech was framing the issue from a comparative perspective, as part of the general tendencies driven by the OECD, so-called "cooperative compliance", in order to organise the tax relationships between Tax Administrations and businesses in a more collaborative and less controversial way. Other experiences in this area have been widely implemented in other European countries such as the Netherlands with "Horizontal monitoring", and the United Kingdom with "Tax Risk Management".
During the Round Table discussion on this topic, delegates explained their relationship with the local tax authorities. In practice, speed of response from the tax authorities was seen as one of the main advantages of “cooperative compliance”, especially in the Netherlands.

The second part of the agenda dealt with a presentation of “Taxation of benefits in kind” from Ms Birgit Graf, Dr Neumann Schmeer und Partner in Germany. Germany’s “most wanted” – the company car of course – served as a starting point for the taxation of the company car in the other countries. It turned out that – from an employee’s point of view – the taxation of the company car in the Netherlands and Ireland were high, whereas Italy won the price for the lowest taxation.

The last hour of the meeting dealt with specific cases of delegates such as unexpected dividend withholding taxes from Germany and stabilization of the financial regime in Cyprus.
The Agenda and Presentations of this European Tax Forum will be available on the INAA Website.
-- Adriaan Daniels

2015 EU T&F Forum - Benefits in kind and their relevance in German payroll accounting - Birgit Graf
2015 EU T&F Forum - Taxes in the Boardroom -  José A. Rozas

Click here to read the report on the Audit Forum in Barcelona!

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