Estonia, EU – Baltic States, Financial Services, Legislation, Markets and Companies, Taxation

The directive regulates how the financial year reports are compiled, setting different requirements for companies of different sizes. The initial aim of the directive was to reduce the administrative burden of smaller companies and increase comparability of financial reporting. Estonia estimates that neither aim is being fulfilled and as the result of implementing the directive, the transparency of our economic room and competitiveness of companies would decrease.

"Estonia has created a comfortable e-reporting system with which we have considerably simplified submitting data. The directive thus, for us, contradicts itself, since it enforces extra reporting for banks and the state," said finance minister Jürgen Ligi.

"The activities of entrepreneurs would be harder since there are no comparable economic results in comfortable electronic environment in order to choose partners or get loans. Non-transparency increases risks, increases the price of loans and reduces access to financing," said Ligi.

Estonia wants to dispute thus the disproportional restriction of the directive according to which extra supplements to business year reports submitted via the Busyness Registry entrepreneurship portal's e-reporting environment can be demanded from small companies only with the aim of collecting taxes. Micro- and small companies form 98% of all companies in Estonia and 54% of sales revenue of all companies. The second provision that Estonia disputes is the one according to which a member state can give up content comparability of annual reports.