The tax amnesty scheme will be abolished with effect from 1 January 2018. This was announced by outgoing State Secretary for Finance Wiebes in a letter to the House of Representatives. The abolition will be set out in the 2018 Tax Plan.
Voluntary Disclosure Scheme
Under the voluntary disclosure scheme (Article 67n of the AWR) no administrative fine will be imposed:
- where the taxpayer, within two years of submitting an incorrect or incomplete tax return, subsequently submits a correct and complete tax return or provides correct and complete information to the tax authorities;
- The penalty for the offence will be reduced if there is an improvement after this two-year period.
In both cases, of course, there must be a voluntary improvement. This means that the taxpayer must have submitted a correct and complete tax return or provided the relevant information before the tax authorities are aware of that information or can reasonably be expected to be aware of it.
The reason for abolishing the voluntary disclosure scheme is that, thanks to improved (international) data exchange, the Tax and Customs Administration is now better equipped to enforce tax legislation. The likelihood of taxpayers being caught is constantly increasing. Consequently, encouraging voluntary disclosure is no longer considered necessary.
Penalty for an offence
Where the offence relates to (foreign) income from savings and investments (Box 3) that has not been declared, or has been declared only in part, the maximum fine is 300% of the tax to be recovered. However, this statutory maximum penalty is not applied. In response to the Panama Papers, the penalty for non-compliance – which is imposed when (foreign) income from savings and investments (Box 3) is concealed – was increased with effect from 1 July 2016 from 60% to 120% of the additional tax claimed.