Facts
This judgment concerns two administrative assistance requests from the Swedish tax authorities to the Federal Tax Administration (FTA) of Switzerland. The requests concerned information on bank accounts and payments of the person concerned [A.] and the company [B.] Ltd. The FTA complied with the requests and issued corresponding final decisions. [A.] , [B.] Ltd. and other parties involved filed appeals against this with the Federal Administrative Court.
The Federal Administrative Court partially upheld the appeals and decided that no information may be transmitted for the tax periods 2013 and 2014, as the statute of limitations had expired under Swedish law. The FTA appealed these judgments to the Federal Supreme Court in public law matters.
Considerations
The Federal Supreme Court states that the requirement of the probable relevance of the requested information is to be assessed at the time the request for administrative assistance is filed. The requested state is generally not obliged to examine the question of the statute of limitations under foreign law. As long as it is not obvious at the time the request is filed that the foreign statute of limitations has already expired, the transmission of the information is permissible.
The Federal Supreme Court holds that the FTA rightly complied with the administrative assistance for the entire requested period from January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2017 in the final decisions of February 11, 2020. However,…