From National Cooperative Compliance to Project-related Multilateral Cooperative Compliance

This article explores risk assessment and assurance programmes, both at the domestic level and at the cross-border level and seeks to consolidate existing literature in this area. Acknowledging that traditional dispute prevention and resolution mechanisms alone cannot provide the tax certainty needed by businesses in an efficient manner, the authors highlight the key role that programmes such as Cooperative Compliance (CC), the International Compliance Assurance Programme (ICAP) of the OECD, the European Trust and Cooperation Approach (ETACA) of the EU Commission and the Finnish Cross-border Dialogue (FCBD) can play for this purpose. This article illustrates the main characteristics of a plethora of national CC programmes around the world as well as of cross-border risk assessment and assurance programmes (ICAP, ETACA and FCBD), it examines their positive aspects and benefits, the challenges that they present and elaborates on relevant legal considerations. Last, the authors identify the limits of existing domestic and cross-border risk assessment and assurance programmes and propose a potential next step forward: multilateral CC programmes that will provide tax certainty in respect of all tax aspects of large cross-border projects (project-related multilateral CC or, simply, PMCC programmes).