Recent News

The European Commission has announced new measures to improve the protection of the EU’s Value Added Tax system against fraud. The EU plans to close all the loopholes in the existing legislation for large-scale frauds. According to the EU Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs Pierre Moscovici, VAT fraud may be a source of funding of criminal activities, including terrorism. “Combating this phenomenon requires much more effective information exchange between competent state bodies, and the mechanisms proposed by us will help this,” the official said at the presentation of introductions. “For example, the experts from the Eurofisk anti-fraud office will be given the access to information on registration of cars from Member States, that will help eliminate one of the main sources of VAT fraud associated with the sale of new and used cars.” Although the tax services of the EU states are still exchanging data on cross-border sales today, manual processing of information plays a significant role in this process. In addition, the data from national union law enforcement authorities regarding criminal groups in ​​VAT frauds are not received...

Over the past two decades, online commerce has become one of the main ways of doing business. Virtual payments are made simply and quickly by filling out simple forms and making a few mouse clicks. Funds are almost immediately transferred from bank cards and are received on the accounts of companies, then the goods and services are delivered to the customers by mail or in person. However, along with all the apparent perfection of such transactions, they are still under control of banking institutions, which implies a number of limitations. Fortunately, progress does not stand still and traditional currencies have been replaced by a cryptocurrency - a virtual form of currency that uses blockchain technology and has decentralized nature. In other words, digital coins are a confidential financial system that allows making remittances without information leakage. Thus, an alternative to the use of credit cards and bank accounts to pay for goods and services today is the use of cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin is the most famous version of it. Accepting payments in Bitcoin has a wide range of advantages for both online stores and offline sales. Certainly, the decentralized nature of...

The Dutch Government plans to strengthen the regulatory regime for representative offices of Dutch trusts, preventing tax evasion and fraud. Recently the Minister of Finance Wopke Hoekstra has announced the key provisions of the new supervisory mechanism approved by the Council of Ministers. In accordance with the introductions, the trust management scheme should be organized as a private or state company (BV or NV) and fulfill certain requirements within the framework of the test for physical presence in the country. Passing the test involves conducting day-to-day management of the trust in the territory of the Netherlands by at least two of its managers. Another significant change is the ban on the provision of trust management services and tax planning to the same person, as well as on the transfer of their competencies with respect to observing the compliance requirements for external management. The obligation to exchange information with each other within the framework of a due diligence mechanism is also introduced for the trusts, so the client who does not meet the verification requirements in one company will not be accepted into another. The reformed legislation...

On October 12, 2017, the Draft Law on Personal Data Processing was announced at the meeting of state secretaries of Latvia, developed by the Ministry of Justice. The purpose of the bill is to establish legal prerequisites for the application of the EU Regulation on General Data Protection with new requirements for the personal data protection. The Regulation will come into effect on May 25, 2018 and will ensure the harmonization of the existing principles for the personal data protection in the Member States of the EU, creating uniform rules that will operate throughout the EU. At the moment, this sphere is regulated by the Law “On Personal Data Protection”, which will lapse from the moment of the application of the Regulation. The Regulation provides for a number of key innovations designed to improve the work of the single market: unified conditions for the personal data protection at the level of the European Union, which relate to the processing, storage, transfer to other enterprises and archiving; application of the principle of agency of one stop to entrepreneurs: companies will have to cooperate only with one supervising agency for the data protection in order to...

On December 6, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Finance Business Service Elena Tkachuk will hold a master class on the topic “Law Firm on the Internet: where and how to catch a client” within the framework of the V International Forum on Promotion of Legal Services PLS. The event will take place on December 5-6 in the conference hall of the Premier Palace Hotel (Kyiv, T. Shevchenko Blvd./ Pushkinskaya Street, 5-7/29), and according to tradition, the organizer will be the newspaper of the Ukrainian lawyers “Legal practice”. The Forum program will be divided into several thematic sessions on topical issues in the development and promotion of legal business, including: Global trends. Challenges-2017. Forecasts-2018. Attraction and maintenance of clients. Investments in development. Innovations. What technological solutions do companies invest in? Legal Tech. Work with an internal client. Digital Marketing. The above topics will be covered not only in the reports of the lawyers and experts in the field of promotion of legal services, but also in live discussions, as well as useful and fascinating master classes, one of which will be held by the CMO of our company....

The mechanisms for providing the global standards of information exchange in tax matters for Jersey and the Isle of Man have been subject to a review by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes, which includes 147 experts, have carried out “revision”. The assessment of jurisdictions for tax transparency included 2 phases. The first phase assumed an analysis of the legal framework of the states, and the second one - monitoring of how fully it is implemented in practice. According to the results of such control, a certain indicator of the level of compliance with the international standard is fixed over the jurisdiction: “compliant”, “mostly compliant” “partially compliant” or “non-compliant” respectively. Within the framework of the second assessment phase, Jersey and Man were given the highest rating, which indicated the recognition of their achievements by the OECD with respect to compliance with global standards of information exchange in tax matters. Now the islands are included in a group of less than 10 jurisdictions which are ahead of the most EU and G20...

The Order of the Ministry of Finance of 09.11.2017 No.926 “On approval of changes to the criteria for assessing the risk degree sufficient to suspend the registration of tax invoice/adjustment calculation in the Unified Register of Tax Invoices” entered into force. The innovations approved by the document assume: Automatic accounting of the information from the technological table (hereinafter referred to as “the Table”) by the Monitoring system and for the payers whose indicators D and P, calculated in the order given in subpar. 4 clause 5, have the following dimensions: D> 0.02, P˂Pm × 1,3, and the volume of goods/services deliveries in TI/AC, compiled from 01.01.2017 in the URTI listed in the Table, is more than 25% of the total volume of supplies for the relevant period; Making the decision of non-inclusion of information from the Table by the SFS Commission in case if the supervisory authority receives the information indicating that the taxpayer has provided untrue data in the Table or about the riskiness of the operation. If such information has been automatically taken into account by the Monitoring system, after making the decision of non-inclusion of the...