Tax Administration EU Summit (TADEUS)

TADEUS 2024

TADEUS 2024 took place on 12-13 December in Budapest, Hungary. Issues discussed include: 

• recent and future developments in administrative cooperation between EU countries to fight VAT and direct tax evasion and fraud
• means for monitoring the performance of such administrative cooperation to identify related business results and draw lessons from it for future improvement in this area
• possible common methodologies for estimating various types of tax gaps
• collaborative efforts in digital security of relevance to tax administrations
• optimising the use of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for tax administration purposes  

TADEUS 2024 Outcome Statement

Priorities

The current work priorities of TADEUS, as stipulated in its current multi-annual plan, are: 

• Digitalisation
• Tax compliance
• Implementation of EU legislation (particularly in administrative cooperation)

Background

Prior to 2018, a series of Commission reports on Member States’ administration of value added tax, income tax and the recovery of taxes had revealed deficiencies in the administrative cooperation among tax administrations of Member States within the EU. 

In April 2018, EU economy and finance ministers agreed to foster cooperation between their tax administrations. In June 2018, the Heads of Tax Administration and the Commission decided - at a meeting in Thessaloniki - to create a forum called Tax Administration EU Summit (TADEUS). 

Since then, heads and deputy heads of EU countries’ tax administrations meet at least twice a year to deepen their cooperation. 

Achievements

TADEUS is proud to have already contributed to the following achievements: 

• Preparatory work for the Proposal for a Council Directive amending Directive 2011/16/EU on administrative cooperation in the field of taxation (DAC7)
• A strategy and reviewed governance including setting-up an Advisory Board for the Eurofisc network to enhance the effectiveness of combatting cross-border VAT fraud
• Guidelines on building trust and ensuring compliance (see recommendations)
• Human resources management agility and readiness model (see EU Competency Framework for Taxation (TaxCompEU))
• A comprehensive analysis of how tax administrations use DAC (see page on DAC) data including recommendations for improvement dentified problems relate to technical and security challenges, data quality issues and receiving valuable data not timely. To overcome these difficulties, the legal framework at Union level could be enhanced but solutions can in the meantime be achieved at administrative level for which this TADEUS project provides useful tips and good practices, such as using identification tools and techniques and business intelligence and text mining tools for tax risk assessment.
• Strengthening EU tax administrations’ awareness and capabilities in digital security, a.o. through setting up an IT Security Professionals Network, preparing for emergency transfer of data, sharing best practices in procurement and levelling up digital security competence of IT resources.
• The use of AI for taxation purposes, including AI maturity assessment, AI policy guide and practical guidelines to AI implementation and technological issues. The final report is available for EU tax administrations at itcollaboration.  

In addition, the following projects have been launched by TADEUS and are in part already in the stage of implementation: 

• Monitoring the performance of administrative cooperation in the EU, through common tools i.e. key performance indicators.  A first series of agreed metrics are under implementation, while further additional metrics are being optimisied. 

• Estimations of tax gaps (personal income tax/social security contributions, corporate income tax, missing-trader intra-community fraud and value added tax e-commerce). Experts identified, evaluated and tested methodologies for each tax type, also highlighting – especially data related – challenges.