Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-15-Speech-4-033"
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"en.20040115.2.4-033"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, I am not Mrs Kauppi, but she is the rapporteur, and I am not. She has asked me to present this report briefly for her today because a week ago she became a mother. On behalf of this House and on my own behalf I would like to offer her our warmest congratulations. She is the mother of a strapping boy, both are doing well and she would like to combine work and family as quickly as possible and resume her work in this House. Warm congratulations, Piia, and all the best!
Turning to her report on the Commission proposal, I can say that it does not criticise the Commission, neither does it raise any cause for concern as to how the Commission has proceeded, but rather as to how the Council has proceeded. Essentially, the Commission proposal seeks to achieve for direct taxation what has already been proposed elsewhere for indirect taxation. The main innovations are the introduction of the possibility for two or more Member States to carry out joint controls where a taxable person is active in more than one Member State, that is, it is a question of common sense and an orderly shaping of the single market.
A second point is the simplification of the procedure and a third the removal of ambiguities from the present text which, as we have heard, is already 25 years old and anyone with their eyes and ears open knows that a lot has been done and changed in that time.
The main problem is one of procedure. In keeping with its normal practice, the Commission has based its proposal on Article 95 of the Treaty, which means that the codecision procedure applies to this proposal. Parliament has always supported this choice of legal basis, for reasons that are easy to understand, and I would also like to say why, namely that we are of the opinion that administrative cooperation does not affect material tax law, but rather seeks to ensure that the single market works well. We therefore welcome the Commission’s legal stance and we would point out that the Council has already on several occasions decided unilaterally to change the legal basis to either Article 93 or Article 94 of the Treaty without giving any convincing reasons, in so doing removing Parliament’s right of codecision and understating the measure’s importance for the single market.
The most recent case concerned two Commission proposals on administrative cooperation in the field of VAT and an amendment to Directive 77/799/EEC, where the Council has recently re-consulted Parliament on the change in legal basis. Parliament rejected that request on 2 September 2003. Since we anticipate that the Council will also change the legal basis for the present proposal, the rapporteur sees no reason to change or re-evaluate her position at this juncture and we therefore propose that the Commission draft be approved in full as proposed on the basis of Article 95. By so doing, we will also be showing with a broad majority that we are ready, minded and determined to co-decide in this matter, because we believe it concerns the single market."@en1
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