Taxpayers' rights in het gedrang?

The OECD Global Forum monitors whether countries fulfill the requirements of Art. 26(2) OECD-Modeltreaty and art. 14 Directive 2011/16/EU tat require that information exchanged between tax authorities of two countries is treated similarly as information acquired under domestic law provisions. The OECD Global Forum advised amongst others the Netherlands to abolish the requirement of informing the taxpayer that information will be exchanged to tax authorities of another country and allowing him a certain period to react whether or not the information that will be exchanged is correct. The change is, according to the OECD Global Forum, desirable in order to speed up the process.Taxpayers' rights according to the Global Forum are sufficiently protected by the privacylegislation of other countries. The Netherlands abolished this requirement as of 1 January 2014. The author discusses whether taxpayers' rights are indeed sufficiently protected and concludes that this is not the case. A minimum requirement should be that taxpayers are informed that information has been exchanged. Only then the requirements of
–
the preambule to the Convention on Mutual Assistance in Tax Matters
– the 2003 OECD in 2003 Model Taxpayers’ Charter;
–the Global Standards for transparency and exchange of information van het Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes en
the IMF Manual on Fiscal Transparency (2007).