ABSTRACT
The introduction of an EU-wide tax requires action by the Community legislator. From a legal perspective, it could therefore be interesting to know whether such legal measures under secondary law can be based on the EC Treaty. Changes in the EC Treaty in that respect are, of course, not impossible, and even the introduction of new secondary Community law requires, in most cases, a broad consensus among Member States. Although such questions are legally challenging, they are less relevant from a political point of view. Therefore, for all the potential taxes the question of whether there is a legal basis for their introduction under the existing primary law framework can be excluded. An issue of legal relevance, in the case of already-existing taxes, might be their degree of harmonization. It is much easier to draft a concept for an EU tax if such a
tax already exists in all or most Member States and is harmonized under European law, or if other relevant factors are essentially similar in most Member States. Moreover, some taxes are closely interrelated either with other taxes or with other legal instruments, such as tax treaties. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the conditions under which it seems realistic to isolate one of these taxes from other taxes and shift the competence to levy these taxes to the European level. From a legal perspective, the relevant question is how the other domestic taxes, or yet other domestic instruments, would interact with such a tax levied all over Europe. Finally, the possible difficulty of collecting the tax will also be taken into consideration. The possible number of taxpayers could be relevant, as well as the possible strategies available to taxpayers to avoid being covered by the tax or to avoid paying it.
