The European Commission has announced that it will ask 15 Member States to provide a substantial number of individual tax rulings.
The request forms part of the Commission’s investigation into whether the tax rulings of Member States may constitute state aid. Tax rulings are comfort letters issued by tax authorities to an individual company on a specific tax matter. They are not generally problematic from a state aid perspective. However, if a tax ruling results in a Member State providing selective advantages to specific companies or groups of companies, this distorts competition in the single market in breach of EU state aid rules.
All EU countries except Estonia and Poland have cooperated and provided the required information in full. The European Commission has therefore issued two injunctions ordering Estonia and Poland to deliver within one month requested information on their tax rulings practice. Should either country fail to deliver the missing information by the deadline, the Commission may refer that country to the Court of Justice.
