Since autumn last year, the Committee of Inquiry into Money Laundering, Tax Avoidance and Tax Evasion (PANA) has been working on identifying tax avoidance tactics and tax loopholes, as uncovered by the Panama Papers. It is the objective of the Committee to reveal relevant infringements and abuses in Union law. The months of work have discovered important information for the EU-wide fight towards transparency and tax justice.

The negotiations on country-by-country reporting (CbCR) and the associated report by MEPs Evelyn Regner and Hugues Bayet (S&D) are continuing. This week, the European Parliament debated the tabled amendment proposals. The specific threshold values, the extent of disclosure requirements, the contents of the reports and the accessibility are still being heavily debated.

On April 11th, the Austrian Federal Chamber of Labour (AK EUROPA) and the Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB Europabüro) jointly organised the event ‘The EU’s uphill struggle against tax dumping: 2 steps forward, 3 steps back?’ within the framework of the No to Tax Havens! campaign at the premises of the Permanent Representation of Austria to the EU in Brussels.

The European Union and multilateral organizations such as the OECD have been working on tax avoidance for a long time. Every year, the EU loses hundreds of billions of euros through tax optimization practices by international corporations such as Apple, Google, McDonalds & Co, which often pay less than one percent of taxes on their profits.

Large corporations and multinational companies have built complicated cross-country structures to avoid paying taxes by exploiting a wide range of national legal systems. Within the scope of the EU’s Anti-Tax Avoidance Package one of these constructions, namely hybrid mismatches, is going to be more thoroughly regulated.

The coming weeks will see the start of the negotiations on the exact specification of the EU transparency register between Commission, European Parliament and Council. Already in September 2016, the Commission had presented its new proposal for a revised transparency register. This week, it was the turn of the European Parliament.

This week, the work of the various EU institutions was under the sign of the advancing digitisation of business and society. Not only Parliament dealt with this issue in various reports; the Commission and ministers of the Member States also discussed it at the so-called “Digital Day” in Rome.

The Federal Chamber of Labour (BAK) is currently opposed to the adaptation/modernisation and to the extension of the EU-Turkey bilateral preferential trade relations. As long as the human rights situation and therefore the exercise of trade union rights does not improve significantly, incentives in the trade policy field would send the wrong signals.

Due to the launch of the report “Benchmarking Working Europe 2017” by ETUI and ETUC, a high-level panel was organised by the Austrian Federation of Trade Unions (ÖGB) the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and AK Europa the Permanent Representation of Austria to the EU in Brussels.