Suchergebnisse

For the first time since the publication of the Court of Justice of the European Union's (CJEU's) decision in Skandia America, a Spanish administrative authority has spoken out explicitly about the impact of such a judgment on Spain. With its resolution, the Spanish administrative authority reopened a closed debate when pointing out that it would be totally inadmissible to reject the application of the Skandia America case to the Spanish legal system only as a result of the particular manner that Article 11 of the VAT Directive has been implemented by the Spanish legislator. This article analyses the problems and doubts concerning the application of the Skandia America judgment to VAT groups constituted under the Spanish VAT Act. To do so, this article performs a three-step analysis. First, the arguments presented by the CJEU to justify its decision in such a judgment are reviewed. Secondly, the author provides a description of the VAT grouping scheme that is applicable in Spain. Finally, the attention is focused on the reasoning offered by the Spanish administrative authority in its resolution to support the fact that the Skandia America judgment is fully applicable to VAT groups located in Spain.

The European proposal on a Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base suggests a sharing mechanism based on the application of an apportionment formula. This formula includes three different factors (labour, assets and sales) with equal weighting. Despite the virtues of this method, we believe that the suggested formula is far from being consistent from an economic point of view and that European institutions should revise it before continuing with the negotiation process. In order to design a new formula, it is vital to take into consideration the objectives of the European proposal and the growing concern about the phenomenon of profit shifting in the EU context. In the light of these premises, two different alternatives are analysed in this article. On the one hand, we refer to the possibility of using a two-factor formula for distributing the tax base amongst Member States, based on assets and labour as productive factors. On the other, we suggest a formula exclusively based on sales as an income-generating factor. Although both alternatives are far from being perfect, we conclude that a single-sales factor formula offers a large number of advantages and is an efficient method to fight against profit shifting strategies.