4.1.Ensuring a more common approach to third country non-cooperative tax jurisdictions
In 2012, the Commission issued Recommendations 12 on measures to tackle aggressive tax planning and encourage third countries to apply minimum standards of good governance in tax matters, and committed to report on their application within three years. The aim was to build a common approach to identifying and dealing with non-cooperative tax jurisdictions, which would create a strong EU stance against them. The implementation of these Recommendations has been monitored through the Platform on Tax Good Governance, which was set up for that purpose. On that basis, further measures have been identified to tackle aggressive tax planning and to strengthen the EU approach in tackling non-cooperative tax jurisdictions.
As an immediate first step, the Commission has published an EU-wide list of third country non-cooperative tax jurisdictions, compiled from Member States' independent national blacklists which were discussed in the December 2014 Platform on Good Tax Governance. Those jurisdictions included on the EU-wide list were identified by at least 10 Member States. The list, published on the Commission's website 13 , offers Member States a transparent tool to compare their national lists and adjust their respective approaches to non-cooperative tax jurisdictions as necessary. Going forward, the Commission will amend this list on a periodic basis to reflect changes to Member States' own national lists.
Further work in screening third countries for compliance with tax good governance standards should be performed on the basis of this list. The Code of Conduct for Business Taxation Group would be the most appropriate forum to do this, based on its previous experience in this field 14 . The screening should start with the countries that appear most frequently on Member States' lists of non-cooperative jurisdictions, as listed in the Annex to this Action Plan, with a view to assisting them in improving their good governance standards. The Commission is ready to support Member States in this work, which should be completed within 24 months.
As a second step, the Commission is willing to coordinate possible counter-measures towards non-cooperative tax jurisdictions to address situations of non-compliance with good governance principle in tax matters.
