Ausführliche Sitzungsberichte

Dienstag, 17. Dezember 2019 - Straßburg

5.2. Anforderungen für Zahlungsdienstleister (A9-0048/2019 - Lídia Pereira)

Mündliche Stimmerklärungen

  Mikuláš Peksa (Verts/ALE). – Madam President, I would like to speak on behalf of the Pirate Delegation. First, it needs to be mentioned that we consider VAT fraud an important topic that needs to be addressed. In this regard, we are grateful that it is being worked on.

However, we can’t support the way the issue is being handled. The whole concept of retaining huge amounts of data without any clear selection of what is really needed and what is thought unnecessary is problematic. At this moment, just 25 cross—border payments quarterly, including offline payments by credit card, are enough to store payees’ data, including credit card numbers, for up to five years. This will create huge amounts of data that will flow with little restriction through databases, seriously lowering privacy and incurring infrastructure costs for such databases, meaning that this whole solution is completely unproportionate to real VAT fraud checks. Yes, we need to use modern technologies to help fight tax fraud. However, in this case we are using a needlessly massive tool that is well capable of causing much more harm than good.