Credit Method Compatibility and Constraints under EU Law: An Analysis of the Case Law of the CJEU

Credit Method Compatibility and Constraints under EU Law is the pioneer in-depth analysis of the European Union (EU) law limitations on devising the credit method sketching the EU law frontiers within which the Member States must operate when they put this method of tax relief into practice. As EU Member States seek to counteract base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) practices while dodging new hurdles to the EU’s internal market such as double taxation, the credit method, also called foreign tax credit, is one of the vital tools in this balancing act, yet it has engendered several EU law challenges and queries.

What’s in this book:

For the first time, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) cases that may affect, directly or indirectly, the credit method and its main components are systematically identified and analysed to extract the legal findings and principles that define the contours within which the Member States can manoeuvre when considering EU-compatible approaches to the credit method. To this end, inter alia, this book offers:

an extensive study of the historical legal developments of the credit method;
an overview of the key design features of the credit method, considering the optional, variable components, such as the credit limitation (maximum creditable amount), that tailor it to different legal and policy considerations;
an analysis of the legal constraints on the key features of the credit method flowing from CJEU case law on the fundamental freedoms, considering the impact of landmark cases and concepts (e.g., Schumacker, neutralization);
the EU law implications based on the type of credit method (direct, indirect, imputation) and the feature of the credit method (e.g., credit limitation, credit carryforward); and
examples to clearly and concisely illustrate the basic operation of the credit method and some of the main calculation and EU law issues.

The book is cored on the author’s doctoral thesis which was awarded the Wolfgang Gassner Science Prize 2020 and the European Doctoral Tax Thesis Award 2020.