Name: Subcommittee on Tax Matters Ordinary meeting
Uploaded: 2026-07-14T14:00:00+00:00
Duration: 6363 s

08:48 - 10:24

Speaker 2

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Welcome back to the colleagues and to the speaker, apart from Benjamin who was already here. And today actually we are speaking about, in this second session, on the Omnibus on taxation, which is a very comprehensive proposal on which the Commission actually, probably more than in other files, there has been a strong effort for a comprehensive package that today we discuss. So it is really a pleasure for me to have the view of our speaker and expert from Benjamin Angel Benjamin from the European Commission TAXUD, then Mr. Gerhard Huemer, Director for Economic and Fiscal Policy, SMEunited, Madame Mariella Caruana, Deputy Director of Taxation and Economics Department, BusinessEurope, Alison Schultz, Research Fellow, Tax Justice Network.

You have as usual seven minutes each, then we go back to the member for their question and then back to the speaker for maximum three minutes for their answer. We start with Mr. Gerhard Huemer. Please, you have the floor for seven minutes.

10:24 - 14:12

Speaker 3

Thank you very much. SMEunited is the association of crafts and SMEs in Europe. We are speaking on behalf of 26 million SMEs in Europe, and you may imagine that not many of them are directly impacted by the proposal on the table. There are very limited which do cross-border activities and there are even less SMEs which are organized in groups affected by some of these rules we are discussing here in this context. The main reason for this is that if there are barriers, also taxation barriers, which hinder SMEs to do cross-border activities, like the different tax base etc. etc., and as long as Europe is not successful in harmonizing tax base or at least allow SMEs to use head office taxation rules or home office taxation rules like the proposals which was rejected by the Council during the last 10, 12 years, it will not change much.

Also if Europe wants to have more SMEs doing cross-border, we have not only need the Omnibus, we need something more to make it at the start attractive for SMEs to do something on cross-border.

This does not mean that the Omnibus is not important, but not that much for our SMEs. The other thing what may help be helpful is to have at least for some SMEs like startups or scale-up SMEs a 28th regime on taxation. You can a bit imagine how likely we will get this in the foreseeable future, but these are the elements which are needed to make SMEs go cross-border and make them beneficial from the Omnibus we have now on our table. We are still assessing with our members the proposal from the Commission. It's quite complex, quite broad, and our member associations are also not super active on these topics because as I said before, there are very few SMEs which are impacted by them.

What we hear so far from our members that they are happy with the addressing the competitiveness challenge related to the fragmentation of R&D tax credits. There will be some advantages from interest deduction limitations, especially when it comes with the safe harbor of the 5 million. We see some good arguments why SMEs should be fully carved out from the anti-tax avoidance directive. It could be justified. And of course, I know how slowly taxation processes are, but doing an Omnibus which aims for simplification with entry into force between 32 and 37 is also not very ambitious from our point of view.

This is what to be very frank what I have at the moment. We are more than happy to provide you with more input when we get more from our members. And therefore I would like to use the second half of my intervention time to hand it over to my colleague from BusinessEurope because she has already much more elements to tell you than I have. Thank you.

14:12 - 14:16

Speaker 1

Thank you very much. Mariella, you want to start?

14:16 - 15:38

Speaker 5

Yes, thank you very much and I will talk about why this proposal is very important for us. So first of all, thank you Chair and thank you to the members of the FISC subcommittee for the invitation to be here and speak on behalf of BusinessEurope. We represent 42 member federations in 36 different European countries and represent some 20 million companies from across Europe. And I want to start today by saying that every day companies across Europe make decisions on where to invest and where to grow. And those decisions shape Europe's future every bit as much as public policy does.

We need in Europe much more investment every year simply to keep pace, and so the question is not whether Europe can afford investment, but whether Europe can afford not to attract it. There are too many companies in Europe that could become Europe's next global champions that are choosing either to invest elsewhere or simply not to invest at all. And whereas tax policy alone will not determine those decisions, it is an important factor because investment depends on confidence and confidence depends on having a framework that businesses can understand, can predict, and can operate.