EU remedies to the inefficiencies of its blacklisting system for tax havens

The Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) recently adopted a resolution introducing changes in the system used to draw up the EU list of tax havens, which up to date was “confusing and ineffective”.

The 2017’s list of tax havens drawn up by the EU has had a “positive impact” so far but it didn’t manage to fully capture the phenomenon of worldwide tax revenue losses, as the list covers only up to 2% of those.

The aim of this new resolution is to make the process of listing or delisting a country more transparent, consistent and impartial; also adding criteria to ensure that more countries are considered a tax haven and prevent countries from being removed from the blacklist too easily. Furthermore, EU member states will be screened too to see if they display any characteristics of a tax haven, and will be regarded as such if there will be any sign of inconformity.

MEPs believe in the importance of considering more practices beyond preferential tax rates in the assessment on the fairness of tax systems; the resolution therefore proposes that all jurisdictions with a 0% corporate tax rate or with no taxes on companies’ profits should be automatically placed on the blacklist.

SOURCE: www.europarl.europa.eu

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