DAC6 – Best Practices

Many organisations – corporates and advisers – are still formulating their policies and processes for complying with DAC6. If you’re also in that position, you’ll probably find this article written by Keith Brockman to be helpful. Keith is VP Global Tax at Welbilt Inc, a US headquartered multinational with annual revenues of over US$ 1.5 billion. He’s also the author of the blog ‘Strategizing Multinational Tax Risks’, which is highly recommended.

You can read Keith’s article here:

Insight: DAC6—Past, Present, and Future

Keith was one of the first people to review our free DAC6 self-assessment tool, and I am extremely grateful for the feedback he kindly provided. The tool consists of an online questionnaire which helps users come to a preliminary view as to whether a particular arrangement is reportable or not. The output of the tool is a traffic light report, which reflects the complex conditionality of the DAC6 hallmarks.

Penalties for non-compliance with DAC6 can be severe – in the UK for example, sanctions include a fixed penalty of £5,000 for failure to report. If an HMRC officer considers this "inappropriately low after taking into account all relevant considerations", they may apply to the First-tier Tribunal to impose a daily £600 penalty, or even to increase the penalty to up to £1 million.

At the time of writing this, there have been over 70 completions of our online tool. Feedback from a community of experienced tax professionals like Keith helps us to continue to improve it, so that we can continue to make it available for free.

If you haven’t tried it already, please use this link to access the tool here.

I look forward to hearing from you with your thoughts and suggestions.