Tax compliance costs for companies in an enlarged European Community

Abstract:
It is widely acknowledged that the administrative and regulatory obligations for tax matters represent a heavy time- and cost-consuming burden, especially for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Tax compliance procedures are recognized to be too complicated for SMEs. This problem becomes even more serious in those cases where SMEs expand their activities cross-border and are confronted not only with their national tax laws, but have to comply also with obligations under national tax codes in different Member States. This book tackles the issue of tax-related compliance costs from a number of perspectives:

Compliance costs from a general point of view
- The economics of the compliance costs of taxation
- Compliance cost considerations in recent tax reforms
- Compliance rules and their enforcement
- The operational burden of compliance rules

Compliance costs from the point of view of a group of companies
- Compliance costs under the separate accounting approach and means to reduce these costs
- Introduction of a common EU tax base as a remedy to compliance costs?
- Defining a 'consolidated' group under a formula apportionment system (knock-in/-out criteria)
- How to share the pie: Formulary Apportionment

A National Report covers a selection of EU countries (Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany,Italy, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia), along with other European countries such as Belarus, Norway and the Ukraine, and Canada, Brazil, New Zealand and the USA.