Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-12-03-Speech-3-258"
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"en.20081203.20.3-258"2
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"Madam President, I must start by regretting that the Commissioner responsible is not here with us, although I am not really surprised, because there is plenty of noise and not much substance on this subject: great rhetorical statements about combating VAT fraud and very few measures with which to do so.
The communications that the Commissioner has presented to us, the last of which was on 1 December this year, make quite a fuss about the damage that tax evasion causes. It affects sufficiency, it affects equity and it causes market distortions with really major amounts of money. VAT fraud accounts for between EUR 60 billion and EUR 100 billion every year.
How can fraud be stopped? The diagnosis given in these communications is also generally correct, rhetorical and grandiloquent. They say that the national authorities have the responsibility to tackle fraud, but that operations where the supplier and the customer do not reside in the same country require cooperation between Member States. They also point out that the Court of Auditors, in its Special Report No 8, states that such cooperation has been clearly unsatisfactory and that action therefore needs to be taken. The problem comes when the Commissioner starts telling us what kinds of action need to be taken. He quite reasonably says that there are two strategies: one, which he calls ambitious, comprises a major reform of value-added tax, involving either a reverse-charge system or a tax withholding system with a clearing house, while the other is what the Commissioner calls ‘conventional measures’.
We gathered from his appearance here on 24 June that he was not thinking of embarking on an ambitious reform under any circumstances and that he would confine himself to the ‘conventional measures’. Subsequently, however, when he described the conventional measures, he put forward four that in principle are not bad. He talked about cutting compulsory declaration deadlines, enhancing cooperation among tax authorities, establishing shared liability when the purchaser of the goods does not declare who sold them, and improving the information on VAT taxpayers. He then concluded by saying that not even these four measures were among the concrete measures he was thinking of adopting. Today he comes up with two proposed amendments to the directive and regulation. He says that the aim of the first is to reduce the period for lodging the statements that VAT taxpayers have to submit from three months to one month, and the aim of the second is to reduce the period for transmitting the information to the Member State that has to charge the tax from three months to one month. Full stop. That is all the proposal lays down.
The Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs has tried to spice up this really insipid story a little, and we have put forward the following amendments. We have approved an amendment favouring small and medium-sized enterprises, the purpose of which is to reconcile fighting tax evasion with simplification of the administrative burden on small enterprises, to which this Parliament and the EU as a whole have a commitment. We therefore say that the Commission must shortly, within two years, present us with a report describing how these measures have performed, how they have affected the administrative costs of businesses and to what extent they have been useful in combating tax evasion.
We also point out that the Commission should get rather more involved than it has been when making legislation. It should play a more leading role. We also call on it to centralise the data that the Member States involved transfer, to draw up a handbook of best practice so that the tax authorities can perform better, to develop indicators to show which areas are risky and which are not, and to tell us who is complying and who is not. Lastly, to make it easier to pursue fraudsters, we are setting up a register of individuals who cannot evade tax by setting up companies.
I regret the fact that the Commissioner cannot respond to the amendments that we have drawn up."@en1
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