Hungary Demands Confidentiality in Value-Added Tax Data Exchange

A Hungarian tax official called for stronger confidentiality rules to protect the identities of businesses when tax authorities exchange data to curb value-added tax fraud.

Hungary would find it unfeasible to share VAT data on businesses with other tax authorities if “the data is mishandled,” Ferenc Vágujhelyi, commissioner at Hungary’s National Tax and Customs Administration, said Monday at the EU Tax Symposium in Brussels.

“I don’t want to share my taxpayers’ data with other member states as open data,” Vágujhelyi said, adding that he supports the exchange of anonymized data to help tax authorities better understand VAT fraud.

He ...