The draft legal texts of the Belgian tax reform contain a set of provisions aiming at amending the tax ruling procedure.
Two key takeaways:
– the ruling requests will be notified to other operational services of the Federal Public Service Finance, which will deliver a non-binding advice. The last word belongs to the Ruling Commission, i.e. the Ruling Commission may in the future overrule the opinion of the operational services. This procedure will in my view contribute to increasing legal hash certainty (i.e., the risk of challenge of the tax rulings in the course of a tax audit is indeed significantly mitigated).
– on a minor note: the draft texts provide, however, that a ruling request will lose its binding force in the event that the ruling is no longer in line with a subsequent interpretation of the provisions concerned (on which the ruling is based) by the Belgian Cour de cassation/Conseil d’Etat/Cour constitutionnelle or by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Fortunately (and logically), this exception to the binding force of tax rulings is only relevant in the case that the ruling request applies to operations or tax periods occuring after the date of the decision (change of case-law) in question.
See the interview of Denis-Emmanuel Philippe in L’Echo.
