EBIT response to the European Commission's Questionnaire on fighting the use of shell entities and arrangements for tax purposes
Fighting the use of shell entities and arrangements for tax purposes
Introduction
Several actions taken by the EU over recent years have provided new powerful instruments to tax administrations to tackle the use of abusive (often purely artificial) and aggressive tax structures by taxpayers operating cross-border to reduce their tax liability. However, even after these important developments, legal entities with no or only minimal substance, performing no or very little economic activity continue to pose a risk of being used in aggressive tax planning structures. Such risks of misuse expand to legal arrangements. This is possible because, while substance of legal entities is addressed by the Code of Conduct Group on Business Taxation within the context of specific preferential tax regimes, there are no EU legislative measures which define substance requirements for tax purposes to be met by entities within the EU. Recent investigations conducted by a consortium of journalists brought the issue again to the attention of the general public with a more pressing request to act at EU level to end this practice.
The issue at stake is the use of legal entities with no or minimum substance and no real economic activities, by taxpayers operating cross-border to reduce their tax liability. While entities with no substance and no real economic activities can be used for different abusive purposes (including for criminal ones, e.g. money laundering, terrorist financing, etc.), this initiative would focus on situations where the ultimate objective is to minimise the overall taxation of a group or of a given structure. The European Commission has received several complaints and requests for action from the European Parliament, from citizens, NGOs, journalists and the civil society in general.