The Netherlands offers a quite interesting fiscal facility for expats. This facility offers the possibility for employers to grant its “extraterritorial” employee partly tax free remunerations. This facility exists because a foreign employee often incurs more costs than a domestic employee. For example the employee may want to send its children to an international school. The employee will have to put some effort in the application of the ruling at the Dutch Tax Administration (Belastingdienst). Dutch version of this article

The Dutch program of R & D tax incentives to stimulate Research &Development activities covers the whole R&D lifecycle, from development to the exploitation of successful R&D. The Government emphasizes the importance of R&D and its willingness to stimulate these activities. This is being underlined by the cooperative attitude of the different Government organizations that are involved with the implementation of the various R & D tax incentives. Dutch R&D tax incentives make a distinction between costs and investment-based R & D tax incentives on the one hand and a profit-based R & D tax incentive on the other hand (i.e. Dutch innovation box).

On July 8 2014 the European Union’s Council of Economic and Finance Ministers (“ECOFIN”) formally adopted an amendment to the European Parent Subsidiary Directive (2011/96/EU) (the “Directive”) On the basis of this Directive EU member states are obliged to exempt from dividend withholding tax certain cross-border profit distributions within a group in order to prevent from double taxation on the profit received and that such groups are not put at a disadvantage compared to only domestically operating groups of companies. The Directive does not apply in case of capital gains.