Almost all of the EU Member States have refused to brief the European Parliament on their enforcement and implementation of the Directive on Administrative Cooperation (DAC) in the field of taxation and its various revisions.

The first version of DAC was adopted in 2011 as Council Directive 2011/16/EU to set out rules and procedures for cooperation between Member States on automatic exchange of information (AEOI) on taxation, specifically income from employment, director's fees, pensions, life insurance products and immovable property. It came into force in 2013 and has since been revised five times. The latest version to be enacted, Council Directive (EU) 2018/822 (DAC6), came into effect in July 2020. It requires Member States to commit to AEOI on cross-border tax-planning arrangements and to impose disclosure rules on intermediaries operating in their jurisdictions. The European Commission (EC) has already drafted DAC7 and DAC8 but they have not yet been adopted.

During the re-drafting of DAC, there has been little independent analysis of the effectiveness of the earlier versions and none covering the period since 2017. The European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (the Committee) has therefore set up a group to try to assess the enforcement and implementation of DAC versions 1 to 4. These amendments to DAC extended the scope of AEOI to cover account balance or value, dividends and interest payments, other financial income, capital gains, advance tax rulings and advance price arrangements and country-by-country (CbC) reports filed by multinational enterprises whose total consolidated revenue is more than EUR750 million.

The Committee notes that publicly available data on the volumes of information exchanged, whether automatically or otherwise, and the value covered by such exchanges, is very limited, especially regarding bilateral flows of information between Member States. Moreover, no quantitative information is available on the exchange of information concerning CbC reports under DAC4...