VAT and Directors’ Fees in the Benelux

The VAT Directive does not clearly address the question of the VAT treatment of directors’ fees, and recent developments in Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg VAT legislation have emphasized the lack of harmonization on that question among the EU Member States. In this article, the authors outline the VAT treatment of directors’ fees in the Benelux. Using some real-life examples, they subsequently show how differences in the VAT treatment of directors’ fees in practice result in an increasing level of legal uncertainty for companies and directors.