Position dated 5 September 2026. Status: In force. Instruments: Zakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o poreskoj administraciji, Official Gazette of Montenegro 104/2026, published 17 July 2026, in force the day after publication; and two rulebooks of the Ministry of Finance, on the manner of reporting cross-border arrangements and on the hallmarks indicating a potential risk of tax avoidance, both in Gazette 116/2026 of 5 August 2026 and in force on 13 August.
Anyone who has worked with a European group knows the DAC6 regime: an adviser who designs or markets a cross-border arrangement carrying a listed hallmark has thirty days to tell the tax authority about it. Montenegro has now written the same duty into its tax procedure act, and unlike the corporate tax package published in the same gazette, this one is not waiting for anything.
The duty and its clock
Article 14j sets a single reporting window. An intermediary must file within thirty days of the earliest of three moments: the arrangement being made available for implementation, the arrangement being ready for implementation, or the first step in implementing it. An adviser who merely provides support, assistance or advice has thirty days from the day that support was given. For marketable arrangements the file is updated quarterly, within one month of the quarter's end, and every relevant taxpayer reports the use of an arrangement within three months of the end of each year in which it was used.
The tax authority assigns a number to each reported arrangement. That number does the coordinating work: an intermediary who receives it, together with the information already filed, from another intermediary is released from filing and simply passes the number on within fifteen days. The same mechanism applies when a number has already been issued by the competent authority of another state.
Who counts as an intermediary
The definition inserted into Article 4 reaches anyone who designs, markets, organises or makes available a reportable arrangement and meets one of four connecting factors: tax residence in Montenegro, a permanent establishment here through which the services are provided, incorporation under Montenegrin law, or registration in Montenegro for the provision of legal, tax and advisory services. A second limb catches anyone who knows, or could reasonably be expected to know, that they have undertaken to provide support, assistance or advice on such an arrangement.
Professional secrecy is dealt with rather than ignored. An intermediary bound by it does not file — but must notify the client in writing within three days that the duty has moved, where that client is itself an intermediary or the relevant taxpayer. If no intermediary is left to report, the taxpayer reports.
What the hallmark catalogue contains
The second rulebook is the substantive half. It sorts hallmarks into five categories and defines the main benefit test as satisfied where obtaining a tax advantage is the main benefit, or one of the main benefits, a person may reasonably expect from the arrangement.
| Category | Examples from the text |
|---|---|
| General, subject to the main benefit test | Confidentiality conditions; remuneration set by reference to the tax advantage, or repayable if it fails; substantially standardised documentation or structure |
| Specific, subject to the main benefit test | Buying a loss-making company and using its losses; converting income into capital, gifts or lower-taxed categories; circular transactions through interposed entities |
| Cross-border transactions | Deductible payments between associated parties where the recipient is resident nowhere, faces a zero or near-zero rate, sits on the EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions, is fully exempt, or enjoys a preferential regime; depreciation of the same asset in more than one jurisdiction; double relief on the same item |
| Exchange of information and beneficial ownership | Arrangements undermining reporting on financial accounts, and opaque ownership chains where the entity has no real staff, equipment, assets or premises and its beneficial owners cannot be identified |
| Transfer pricing | Unilateral safe harbours; transfers of hard-to-value intangibles; intra-group transfers after which the transferor's projected three-year EBIT is under half of what it would have been |
Two of these deserve a second reading. The transfer-pricing hallmark with the EBIT test is mechanical: it does not ask whether the restructuring was reasonable, only what the projection shows. And the opaque-ownership hallmark does not require a tax advantage at all — it sits in the category that is not subject to the main benefit test.
The limit worth knowing
A cross-border arrangement, as defined, concerns more than one EU member state, or one EU member state and a third country. Montenegro is a third country. So a structure touching Montenegro and Germany is within the definition, and a structure touching only Montenegro and a non-EU jurisdiction, on the wording, is not. That is a real boundary, and it is drawn by the definition rather than by any exemption.
Penalties moved at the same time. The fine range in Article 105 — which by its own words covers a legal person, a branch of a foreign company and a trust — rose from 1,000–15,000 to 4,000–40,000 euros, with the responsible person's range rising from 100–1,000 to 400–4,000, and new offence points were added that track the Article 14j duties one by one, including the three-day notice to the client. If you are reviewing a Montenegrin holding structure, our company formation page sets out the corporate side, and our note on the ATAD rulebooks explains why the substantive rules published beside this one are on a different timetable.
What did not change
The tax procedure act's ordinary machinery — assessment, appeals, limitation, collection — is untouched by these two rulebooks, which add a reporting stream rather than a tax. Nothing here creates a liability: an arrangement that must be reported is not for that reason abusive, and the hallmark catalogue says so by making most categories conditional on a separate main benefit test. There is also no look-back window for arrangements, in contrast with the advance rulings regime in Article 14i, which does carry an express retroactive period.
How to verify
The gazette's register carries the amending law with its promulgation decree and every page: sluzbenilist.me/propisi/396192. Article 14j runs across pages 8 to 10; the deadlines are in paragraphs 3, 4, 5 and 20, the professional secrecy carve-out in paragraphs 9 to 11, and the twenty-five per cent association test in paragraph 21. Article 26, on the last page, is the entry-into-force clause — the day after publication, with no deferred application.
The two rulebooks are at 396830 for the reporting procedure and 396831 for the hallmarks. Both were signed on 29 July 2026 and both end with the plain eighth-day clause. We follow this file under Legal Updates.
