The Council, during its meeting on 14 and 15 February, adopted a directive aimed at strengthening administrative cooperation in the field of direct taxation to assist member states combat tax evasion and tax fraud. The directive will ensure that the OECD standard for the exchange of information on request is implemented in the EU. It prevents a member state from refusing to supply information concerning a taxpayer of another member state on the sole grounds that the information is held by a bank or other financial institution. The directive identifies certain details that must be specified in requests for information, namely the identity of the person under investigation and the tax purpose for which the information is sought.

The directive also sets out a step-by-step approach aimed at ensuring automatic exchange of information for eight categories of income and capital over a number of years. Adoption of the directive follows an agreement reached at the Council's meeting on 7 December. The deadline for transposition of the directive into the national laws of the member states is 1 January 2013. For full details see http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/ecofin/119310.pdf