DAC 6 (cross-border arrangements) – notification of the intermediary to the taxpayer may be completed by 15 January 2021

23 / 11 / 2020

Tax Alert Portugal

The date by which the intermediaries (e.g. lawyers), subject to the obligation of the contractual secrecy or legal professional privilege, must notify taxpayers to comply with the obligation to report to the Tax Authority ("AT"), on cross-border tax planning arrangements implemented between 25 June 2018 and 30 June 2020, has been postponed from 1 December 2020 to 15 January 2021.

It is recalled that the taxpayer must subsequently comply with this communication obligation within 30 days of such notification and inform the intermediary of its compliance within the same period. If he does not do so, the intermediary is subsidiary obliged to carry out the same obligation of communication to the AT until 28 February 2021 (the deadline has not changed for the time being).

It should also be noted that, as regards cross-border and domestic arrangements implemented between 1 July and 31 December 2020, the respective deadline will continue to apply from 1 January 2021.

These obligations result from the transposition of Council Directive (EU) 2018/822 of 25 May 2018, also identified as "DAC 6", which implemented a regime of obligation to report operations indicating a potential risk of tax evasion/avoidance named as “arrangements".

This Directive was transposed by Law 26/2020 of 21 July, amended by Decree-Law 53/2020 of 11 August, which had already postponed the deadline indicated above from 31 July to 1 December 2020 and created the "DAC 6 Forum" to monitor the correct application of this law.

This new postponement, as determined by Dispatch of the SEAF n.º 444/2020 XXII, took into account the fact that the model communication form by which these reporting obligations must be fulfilled has not been approved yet, as well as its instructions for filling in and the guidelines issued by the AT clarifying this issue, which are being analyzed by the DAC Forum 6.