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The Irish Minister for Finance made his annual budget announcement on October 10 2017. The budget contained a number of measures proposing amendments to domestic Irish tax law, most of which were in line with pre-budget expectations. In addition, as part of the budget package, the minister also published a paper on Ireland's international tax strategy and corporation tax review (the strategy paper), which provides valuable insight into the Irish tax policy agenda for the coming years.

Greece has embraced the European Commission's recommendation (on December 6 2012) for an action plan to strengthen the fight against tax fraud and tax evasion, which, among others, includes the implementation of a general anti-abuse rule (GAAR). Namely, by virtue of Article 38 of the Greek Tax Procedures Code (i.e. L. 4174/2013), a domestic GAAR has been introduced into the Greek fiscal landscape, in force as of January 1 2014, according to which the tax authorities may disregard any artificial arrangement or series of arrangements aiming to avoid taxation and lead to a tax advantage.

The OECD guidelines, which were updated in July 2017 to incorporate Action Plan 13 of the BEPS project, provide a minimum requirement of maintaining a three-tiered documentation system.

The German federal government and the federal states have set up a joint working group to examine the possibility of lowering the threshold that triggers the real estate transfer tax (RETT) in share deal transactions. In addition, some of the federal states in the upper house of Parliament launched their own initiative to ask the federal government to consider amending the RETT code based on future recommendations of the joint working group.

The Cyprus VAT Act has been amended in relation to the procedure to be followed for an appeal against an assessment issued by the tax department. This amendment entered into force on July 7 2017.

The Department of Finance (Canada) released proposed draft legislation on September 8 2017 to amend the Excise Tax Act (Canada) (the ETA) in order to provide new investment limited partnership rules (the proposed rules). These rules would deem general partners that provide management and administrative services to such partnerships to have made taxable supplies subject to goods and services tax/harmonised sales tax (GST/HST).

Widening the tax rules to address the evolving digital economy is a regular talking point for many. Channing Flynn, partner and global digital tax leader, and Jennifer Cooper, senior manager of international tax services, at EY highlight what’s next on the agenda.

The Australian government is reviewing the tax policy applicable to stapled structures, which are commonly used in the real estate, infrastructure and related sectors following the issue of Australian Taxation Office (ATO) Taxpayer Alert 2017/1 and a Treasury consultation paper earlier in 2017.

Country-by-country reporting (CbCR) was implemented in Bulgarian legislation via the Act to Amend and Supplement the Tax and Social Security Procedure Code (TSSPC), which was published in issue 63 of the State Gazette on August 4 2017.

The Local Taxes Act (Act), part of the 2017 Croatian tax reform, entered into force on January 1 2017. The main change includes the introduction of the new real estate tax (not to be confused with the real estate transfer tax) and the abolishing of the company name tax. Aside from the real estate tax, no further taxes are introduced. Instead, the taxes regulated by the Law Concerning the Financing of Units of Local Government and Regional Self-Government are being transferred and incorporated into this new Act in order to align them into a more efficient and structural manner within the goals of the Croatian tax system reform.