Harmonization, cooperation and coordination of taxes at an EU-level can significantly improve the performance of tax systems.

European tax integration appears thus to be a priority task. However, today the uniformity principle makes tax coordination hardly feasible.

Therefore, the project seeks to evaluate enhanced cooperation as the legal instrument allowing a group of nine Member States to commonly proceed with integration.

Besides the substantive scope and procedural conditions of enhanced cooperation, the most significant options of applying enhanced cooperation in the area of tax policy in Europe will be identified, analyzed and discussed. A key task of the research project is the examination how the mechanism of enhanced cooperation could contribute to:

• the implementation of a Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base

• the implementation of an EU tax, in particular the implementation of a financial sector tax and the implementation of a telecommunication tax

• the EU-wide unification of income tax regimes with regard to “charitable associations”