Talk about having a lot to deal with. If one finance minister was at the centre of most of the controversial tax issues in 2013, mainly to do with the exchange of tax information, it was Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf of Switzerland.
British legislation withdrawing a method of recovering tax charged in breach of EU law, “without notice and retroactively”, is against EU law, the European Court of Justice decided today in its verdict in the Franked Investment Income Group Litigation case.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in the US has acknowledged that certain parts of the standard used to account for income taxes cause problems for investors and other users.
The Cayman Islands and Costa Rica have become the 11th and 12th jurisdictions to sign bilateral intergovernmental agreements (IGA) with the US for the implementation of the Foreign Account Compliance Act (FATCA). And soon there could be at least 28, which are being used as the mechanism to clamp down on undeclared assets held by US citizens with foreign financial institutions (FFIs).
A much more focused approach to selecting taxpayers for audit would be one of the benefits if the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) adopted a formal tax risk assessment approach, a group of tax executives, practitioners and academics have said.
