The Chairman of the European Parliament’s Committee of inquiry to investigate alleged contraventions and maladministration in the application of Union law in relation to money laundering, tax avoidance and tax evasion (Hereafter: PANA) has published information request which he has sent to the Governments of the EU Member States. In his letter the Chairman of PANA requests the highest political level of responsibility of each respective EU Member State to provide PANA with information about the relevant national legal definition(s) of tax-related crimes, about the organization of tasks between the national administrations and the judiciary and about staff resources and working methods, as well as about the results achieved to date.
According to the information request(s) sent out by the Chairman of PANA the responses will be used for compiling a retrospective overview of the systems implemented by the Member States and an ex-post evaluation of the performance of the competent administrative and judicial authorities to date, as regards investigating cases of tax evasion, tax avoidance, tax fraud and money laundering at the EU Member State level.
All EU Member States have received similar letters and the more specific the Chairman of PANA requests the responsible authorities input in relation to:
· The legal definitions of administrative and criminal tax-related offences in your Member State covering, as appropriate, avoidance, evasion, fraud and money laundering at both the individual and corporate levels, as well as the references to the national laws underpinning these definitions, as appropriate.
· The names, mission statements and powers of the entities in your Member State, which are responsible for the handling of Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs), and, as appropriate, the name(s) of the Financial Intelligence Unit(s) (FIUs) required under European Union Law, including details on structures, staff resources, working practices and activities intackling tax-related crimes. Furthermore, a paragraph explaining how the relevant national entities interact or an organogram would be especially helpful.
· Information on the national prosecution and penalties regime applicable and applied in your Member State in relation to tax-related offences, supported by an explanation on the state of play in relation to the number of cases (progress and outcomes, as appropriate), and a statement covering achievements and problems encountered to date. In particular, up-to-date information on the activities of the national supervisory authorities for credit and financial institutions and other obliged entities would be welcome, including statistics on the number of cases related to the offences covered in the first bullet point e.g. the types of companies involved, the types of offences sanctioned and the value of the penalties/fines issued. Furthermore, it would also be helpful to submit information on the number of ongoing and planned investigations pursuant to the Panama Papers and Bahamas leaks. If specific case-information may not be shared for legal reasons, the submission of consolidated anonymised data or analysis would nevertheless be helpful.
In his letter the chair of PANA asked the authorities to respect a deadline of mid-January. We obviously cannot be sure which authorities did already respond to the request and which authorities did not. However on the PANA website until now only a limited number of responses has been published. As per Feburary 9, 2017 the following responses from national authorities were available on the website of PANA:
· Reply from Ministry of Finance of the Kingdom of Belgium
· Reply from Ministry of Finance of the Bulgarian Republic
· Reply from Ministry of Finance of the Estonian Republic
· Reply from Ministry of Finance of the German Republic
· Reply from Minister of Development and Finance of the Polish Republic
· Reply from Ministry of Finance of the Portuguese Republic
· Reply from Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic
· Reply from Ministry of Finance of the Kingdom of Sweden
Since all governments of EU Member States received similar/identical information request as we decided to only include a link to the information request that was sent to the Austrian Minister of Finance which can be found here (The information requests that were sent to the governments of the other EU Member States can be found at the website of PANA)
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