By Davide Anghileri, University of Lausanne
Switzerland’s Federal Tax Administration (FTA) on May 8 announced that for the first time it transmitted information on private tax rulings to partner states thus meeting its obligation of spontaneous exchange of information.
In this way, Switzerland continues to demonstrate its commitment to implementing international standards in the area of taxation requiring tax transparency.
Under spontaneous exchange of information, tax authorities must share information if they encounter something that may interest to another state. Advance tax rulings themselves are not directly exchanged; only an agreed template containing information from the tax ruling is spontaneously exchanged.
In particular, the FTA transmitted its first batch of 82 reports to a total of 41 states, including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Russia. The FTA revealed that certain reports were exchanged with several partner states and that the exchange concerned private tax rulings that were still effective on 1 January 2018.
The exchange is based on tax administrative assistance rules introduced by Switzerland after Switzerland ratified the OECD/Council of Europe Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters. The exchanges were made within the framework of the OECD/G20 base erosion profit shifting (BEPS) project.
In Switzerland, advance tax rulings are usually agreed and issued by the cantonal tax administrations. However, it is the FTA, at the federal level, that carries out the administrative assistance procedure and transmits the agreed template containing the information regarding the rulings to the partner states. The cantons are not in charge of any transmissions. They only must forward the rulings to the FTA.
Davide Anghileri
Davide Anghileri is a PhD candidate at the University of Lausanne, where he is writing his thesis on the attribution of profits to PEs. He researches transfer pricing issues and lectures for the Master of Advanced Studies in International Taxation and Executive Program on Transfer Pricing.
Anghileri, a Contributing Editor at MNE Tax, previously worked as a policy advisor to the Swiss government on BEPS issues.
Davide can be reached at [email protected].
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