In 2016, country-by-country reporting was introduced to enable tax authorities to conduct an initial assessment of BEPS and transfer pricing risks based on risk indicators. The mandatory use of the digital reporting format eXtensible Markup Language (XML) creates the prerequisites for an automated and resource-efficient audit of the country-by-country reports. It also offers advantages with regard to the international exchange of filings between the tax authorities of the relevant jurisdictions. From February 1st, 2021, the XML scheme 2.0 published by the OECD must be used for reporting to the BZSt (Germany) and the responsible tax office via FinanzOnline (Austria). Andreas Seebeck and Fabian Lutz present the main innovations of the OECD CbCR XML scheme 2.0 and give a general overview of the possibilities and challenges of reports in XML format for an automated initial risk assessment by tax authorities.
