Svitlana Vorobei: The Ministry of Finance is Fully Committed to the  Implementation of the BEPS Action Plan in Ukraine

On September 24-25, the international online conference "Implementation of the BEPS Action plan in Ukraine" was held. The participants of this conference were representatives of the Ministry of Finance, the State Tax Service of Ukraine, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, foreign tax authorities, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ), the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Technical Assistance, the Intra-European Organization of Tax Administrations (IOTA), the International Monetary Fund, etc.

Deputy Minister of Finance of Ukraine Svitlana Vorobei noted that considerable attention is paid to the effective and consistent work on the implementation of the steps of the BEPS plan in Ukraine.

She also said that Ukraine has successfully ratified the MLI Convention. This makes it possible to improve the mechanisms for the elimination of the artificial use of the tax advantages of international agreements on the avoidance of double taxation.
The Head of the State Tax Service of Ukraine Oleksii Lyubchenko, briefed participants on Ukraine’s key steps to implement the BEPS action plan into national legislation.

The comparison of MLI standards with the provisions of more than seventy current international agreements on the avoidance of double taxation is ongoing. These synthesized texts are published on the official website of the Ministry of Finance.
Recently, the Ministry of Finance has consistently pursued a policy of revising current Ukraine’s international agreements on the avoidance of double taxation. The aim of this work is to bring current agreements in line with the standards of the OECD Model Tax Convention and to increase the tax rates on passive income received in Ukraine and paid to non-residents.

Further work on counteracting the use of aggressive tax planning schemes, according to Svetlana Vorobei, will be Ukraine’s accession to the automatic exchange of information within the framework of the MCAA CRS Multilateral Convention under the conditions and rules of OECD. For this Ukraine is successfully undergoing an audit on its readiness to participate in this exchange.