Stronger cooperation, making full use of EU agencies' support, should also be promoted with other law enforcement bodies, in particular the authorities responsible for anti-money laundering, justice and social security. Inter-agency cooperation is essential to ensure an efficient fight against tax fraud, tax evasion and tax related crimes. Europol can play an important role in enhancing information exchange by contributing to the identification and dismantling of criminal networks/groups.
In the context of the preparation of its legislative proposal for a review of the Third Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD), to be presented shortly, the Commission is considering to explicitly mention tax crimes as predicate offences to money laundering, in line with the 2012 recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force-FATF. This will facilitate the cooperation between tax authorities and judicial and financial supervisory authorities in order to tackle serious infringements of tax law. The enhancement of the AML customer due diligence procedures as well as increased transparency of beneficial ownership information collected for AML purposes within the framework of the review of the AMLD could also facilitate the use of relevant data for taxation purposes, e.g. to improve the effectiveness of the treatment of offshore investment structures under the EU Savings Taxation Directive. In addition, co-operation could be further facilitated by an EU-wide harmonisation of the money laundering offence, its definition and related sanctions. In this regard, the Commission plans to propose, beyond the review of the Third AMLD, a specific Directive on combating money laundering in 2013.
