PensionsEurope welcomes the European Commission (EC) fitness check on supervisory reporting requirements, and we find it important that the EC continues regularly conducting them.

Pension funds’ first reporting of quarterly data on assets (for the third quarter of 2019) under the new ECB and EIOPA reporting requirements will take place in mid-December 2019. These new requirements will remarkably increase the burden and costs to pension funds, and it is important that the requirements will be fitness checked in the upcoming years. On the other hand, we find it important that the reporting templates and their taxonomy are stable, and they should not be subject to frequent change.

You can read PensionsEurope comments to the EC on the fitness check on supervisory reporting requirements for pension funds here.

On 23 October 2018, the Spanish government published a first draft of the law to implement the Spanish Financial Transactions Tax (FTT). On 15 November 2018, PensionsEurope answered to its consultation and e.g. warned that the FTT would be detrimental to pension savings. You can read PensionsEurope answer here.

Besides the plans of the Spanish government to introduce a national FTT, the Austrian Presidency has put forward proposals to simplify and restrict the scope of the FTT being discussed by the remaining ten Member States considering the introduction of an EU wide FTT under the enhanced cooperation procedure. On 27 November 2018, PensionsEurope published a press release and e.g. stressed that PensionsEurope is against the establishment of taxes on financial transactions, since such taxes, in their various typologies, end up becoming taxes on savings or pensions, in addition to affecting the efficiency of markets and producing a relocation in the financing flows of the real economy, towards companies established in non-taxed jurisdictions. You can find PensionsEurope press release here.