Overview of the tax law decisions of the Swiss Federal Administrative Court published in the week of 5 - 12 April 2020.
- Judgment of 19 February 2020 (A-601/2019 and A-606/2019): Value Added Tax (VAT); tax avoidance (2009 to 2015); (foreign) art holding structure similar to "aircraft cases", which generated revenues exclusively from the rental of its works of art to the beneficial owner; decision appealed to the Federal Supreme Court; for details see our article of 1 March 2020.
- Judgement of 18 April 2019 (A-983/2018): Customs; demand for payment of duties; decision confirmed by the Federal Supreme Court in its judgement of 9 September 2019 (2C_515/2019); cf. our contribution of 13 October 2019.
- Judgement of 31 March 2020 (A-978/2020): VAT; group taxation (retroactive effect); the present proceedings are based on a judgement of the Federal Supreme Court (2C_962/2018 of 29 January 2020) (see our contribution of 1 March 2020). Question whether an application for the establishment of a VAT group during the current tax period can have retroactive effect. There are two prerequisites for this: (i) the individual taxpayers have not yet submitted a VAT statement at the time of the request, (ii) the deadline for submitting the statement must not have passed. Point (ii) in the present case depends essentially on when the branches became subjectively taxable, which must be clarified by the FTA; partial approval of the appeal with rejection to the FTA for further clarification and reassessment.
Decisions of the Federal Administrative Court in the area of administrative assistance:
- Judgement of 12 November 2018 (A-625/2018 and A-3455/2018): Administrative assistance - Double Taxation Convention Switzerland - Sweden (DTA CH-SE); the appeals are partially upheld; decision partially confirmed by the Federal Supreme Court in its judgement of 22 July 2019 (2C_1053/2018); cf. our contribution of 18 August 2019.
Decisions are listed chronologically by publication date.
