On 17 May 2023, IOTA accomplished another impressive digital event. The Webinar on “Optimisation of Tax Declaration Processes for Individuals” welcomed a distinguished group of speakers from IOTA member administrations such as Estonia, Finland, Greece, and Italy along with a large number of attendees in the virtual space. This event brought together over 100 tax officials from 26 IOTA member administrations, who had the opportunity to learn about the latest experiences, share best practices and deepen their knowledge of tax declaration processes for individuals, as well as build a valuable network during the IOTA Webinar.

On 25-27 April 2023, IOTA had the pleasure of hosting the Case Study Workshop on “Transfer Pricing Special Issues: Intangible Asset Value Creation/Determination” in Budapest, Hungary. As the first fully face-to-face technical activity of the year, the Case Study Workshop welcomed 47 tax officials from 27 IOTA member administrations to the event.

The Finnish Tax Administration (VERO) is happy to welcome you to a Workshop on Implementing a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Taxation System. VERO ran a major operations and application renewal programme during the years 2013-2019. The programme developed taxation processes and replaced over 70 legacy applications with a COTS tax software solution. Due to the recent interest in our experiences, we have decided to organise a workshop on our COTS implementation on 13-14 September with a one-day plenary meeting on Wednesday and a possibility to have one-on-one discussions with VERO’s experts and directors who have been involved in the implementation on Thursday.

On 20 April 2023, IOTA successfully carried out another fascinating digital event. We welcomed a distinguished group of tax officials from IOTA member administrations to share insights, gain knowledge and build a valuable network during our Webinar on “Understanding Practices to Facilitate Risk Analysis of Transactions Involving Crypto Assets”. The event brought together over 200 tax experts from 31 IOTA member countries who joined digitally to the meeting.

We are happy to inform you about a new milestone that we have most recently achieved in the history of the VITARA Portfolio. In order to improve the user experience and mitigate the administrative processes for the VITARA learners,  we made the completion time of the VITARA Courses significantly more flexible and practical than ever before.

The Swiss Federal Council appointed Tamara Pfammatter as the new Director General of the Swiss Federal Tax Administration (FTA). Ms. Pfammatter took office on 1 April 2023 and will succeed Adrian Hug, who retired at the end of March 2023.

We are drawing the end of this week with one plus great news about a newly published IOTA Paper. This edition runs under the title ‘Application of the General Anti-Avoidance Rule in Complex Tax Avoidance Schemes: Practical Examples’, and is written by Martynas Endrijaitis, Deputy Head of the State Tax Inspectorate under the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Lithuania.