Abolition of voluntary disclosure scheme on the horizon

The voluntary disclosure scheme as introduced with the aim of getting tax payers who had been guilty of filing incorrect or incomplete tax returns to right their wrongs. The central plank of the scheme has been that the additional tax assessment should not be augmented by a penalty on condition that the “voluntary discloser” in question him or herself should have come clean of their own accord. At first the scheme was available for all tax years. It was then decided, with effect from the second of July 2009, that the penalty-exempt term should be confined to no more than two years of the date as at which the tax return in question was filed or should have been filed, with a moderated penalty being imposed in the event of the above deadline being missed. The past years have seen increases on several occasions in the residual tax negligence penalty for failure to comply with the deadline, to its current level of 120 percent of the additional tax assessment for “Box 3” assets. 

The State Secretary for Finance is about to proceed with the outright abolition of the voluntary disclosure scheme. This will be done in the context of the 2018 Tax Plan. The first of January 2018 has been pinpointed as the effective date of abolition of the scheme (and the date from which penalty-free voluntary disclosure will be a thing of the past).

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Dutch version: Inkeerregeling wordt afgeschaft per 1 januari 2018