Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-16-Speech-2-136"
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"en.20010116.8.2-136"2
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"Mr President, I want first of all to thank Mrs Oomen-Ruijten for an excellent report. Many previous attempts have, of course, been made to use frontier workers’ problems as a way in to harmonising tax legislation as a whole. However, Mrs Oomen-Ruijten knows that frontier workers do not even constitute half a per cent of the labour force, that their problems are different from one frontier region to another and that different regional solutions are therefore needed if frontier workers are to have a better time of it.
I can speak from personal experience, having spent 25 years commuting between Denmark and Sweden. We have now acquired a bridge between Copenhagen and Malmö, and everyone expects a sharp increase in cross-border commuting and for the two cities to become a conurbation It was here that, in 1997 on the initiative of the Danes, the EU-supported principle was introduced of taxing people in the country in which they work. This means that people can take up residence in Malmö and have access to health care, child care, education and everything else, at the same time as paying all their tax to the Danish State. That is quite intolerable if we are to have a common Öresund region.
The alternative recommended by Swedish politicians is the OECD model for frontier taxation, which advocates that tax should be levied in the country of residence. That principle too causes problems, however, because much more than families’ social welfare is financed through tax.
For ourselves in the Öresund region, it would in actual fact be best if we were to pay local tax where we live and State tax where we work. I think that would put an end to tax avoidance and to cheating in frontier regions. However, a model such as that, too, would require some form of fine tuning in order to create an entirely fair situation, for these are complicated issues. It is therefore crucial for solutions to be worked out in the affected regions themselves, and on the basic principle that frontier workers must pay tax in the country in which they enjoy their benefits financed through tax. Only in that way will long-lasting solutions be obtained. It is essential to adopt a principle of this kind if Öresund is to become a common region."@en1
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