Tax Splitter
VAT fraud and late remittance cost EU member states an estimated €128 billion every year, while Dutch entrepreneurs spend 30–40 hours annually on VAT admin. Together with mintBlue, FIDES Labs and the Belastingdienst, Credenco is piloting Tax Splitter: a system that automatically separates the VAT portion from every payment and remits it in real time. The invoice is the declaration — and both parties are identified by verifiable credentials from their Business Wallet. In March 2026, Tax Splitter won the Ministerie van Financiën Innovation Prize.
The Challenge
VAT is the largest single source of government revenue in the Netherlands — and one of the most fraud-prone. Entrepreneurs declare and remit VAT quarterly, which creates a natural window between when VAT is collected and when it reaches the tax authority. That window is exactly where btw-carrouselfraude lives.
- The EU VAT gap is estimated at €128 billion per year.
- Dutch entrepreneurs spend 30–40 hours per year on VAT administration.
- The Belastingdienst has limited real-time insight into VAT flows until after the fact.
- Sender identity on invoices is not cryptographically guaranteed — spoofed VAT numbers and fake suppliers are common.
The ambition — set out in the Belastingdienst's Tax 3.0 vision — is to move from periodic self-declaration to real-time taxation: "sandwich ordered, tax settled". That only works if both sides of the transaction can prove who they are, and if the VAT portion can be split off automatically.
The Solution
Tax Splitter combines three complementary building blocks into a single flow.
1. Verifiable business identity. Every participating organisation runs a hosted Business Wallet. KVK issues the Chamber of Commerce number and RSIN as verifiable credentials; the Belastingdienst issues VAT number and tax address. Before a transaction starts, both parties have already proven their legal identity to each other.
2. Split payment at the moment of transaction. mintBlue's stablecoin-based split-payment protocol automatically separates the VAT portion from the gross amount and routes it directly to the Belastingdienst. The merchant receives the net; the tax authority receives the VAT. No quarterly declaration, no timing gap.
3. Decentralised discovery via FIDES Blue Pages. Counterparties are looked up through Credenco's Blue Pages — a decentralised business catalogue built on verifiable credentials and DIDs. There is no central database; each legal entity publishes its own Linked Verifiable Presentations, crawled and indexed over Web and EBSI.
The result: the invoice, the identity check and the tax payment are collapsed into a single transaction.
Credenco's Role
Credenco is the wallet and identity-infrastructure partner inside the Tax Splitter Lab. Our scope for the pilot phase (Oct 2025 – Mar 2026):
- Hosted Business Wallets — up to four organisational wallets for the pilot participants, with DID management (did:web, did:ebsi) and key management out of the box.
- FIDES Blue Pages — the decentralised counterparty catalogue that lets mintBlue and the Belastingdienst discover and verify participants without a central registry.
- Integration support for mintBlue — hands-on guidance so the split-payment protocol can consume Credenco-issued credentials and presentations.
- Standards alignment — W3C VC, OID4VCI, OID4VP and DIIP v5, so the pilot is interoperable with other EUDI-ready wallets from day one.
At a glance
Sector
Public · Tax & Finance
Initiative
FIDES Labs — Tax Splitter Lab
End client
Belastingdienst · Ministerie van Financiën
Consortium
mintBlue · Credenco · FIDES Labs
Status
Live pilot · Innovation Prize 2026
How a Tax Splitter transaction works
Three steps, one transaction — identity, payment and tax declaration happen simultaneously.
1. Identify
Business Wallets exchange credentials
Both parties present KVK (CoCnr, RSIN) and Belastingdienst (VAT, tax address) credentials from their Business Wallet. Each side knows instantly that the other is a real, registered, VAT-liable entity.
2. Pay
mintBlue splits the transaction
mintBlue's split-payment protocol separates the VAT portion from the net amount. The net goes to the supplier; the VAT goes directly to the Belastingdienst — as a single atomic operation.
3. Report
Invoice is the declaration
The Belastingdienst receives only the tax-relevant fields — date, amount, VAT percentage — already signed and linked to verified identities. No quarterly declaration is needed.
The consortium
Tax Splitter is built by a small, tightly integrated consortium — each partner owns a specific layer of the stack.
End client & data recipient
Belastingdienst
Commissioner
Ministerie van Financiën
Split-payment protocol
mintBlue
Lab facilitator
FIDES Labs
Business Wallet & Blue Pages
Credenco
Impact
What changes when VAT is collected at the moment of transaction, not quarters later.
From 30–40 hours to zero
Dutch entrepreneurs spend an average of 30 to 40 hours per year on VAT administration. When the invoice itself is the declaration, that number drops to zero — without giving up oversight.
Closes the VAT gap
The European Commission estimates the annual EU VAT gap at €128 billion. Real-time split-payment removes the window in which VAT can go missing, be miscalculated or be routed through fraudulent carousels.
Verifiable identity at both ends
Every transaction is signed by a sender and receiver whose legal identity, VAT number and tax address were issued as verifiable credentials by KVK and the Belastingdienst — not self-declared.
Privacy by design
The Belastingdienst only receives the tax-relevant fields of a transaction — date, amount, VAT percentage. The rest of the invoice stays between the two businesses and their wallets.
Recognition
Innovation Prize 2026 — Ministerie van Financiën
In March 2026, Tax Splitter was awarded the Innovation Prize of the Ministerie van Financiën. The jury highlighted the combination of real-time VAT settlement with verifiable organisational identity as a pragmatic path towards reducing the EU VAT gap while cutting administrative burden.
Future Outlook
The same split-payment + verifiable identity pattern extends naturally to other tax categories: excise duties, tourism tax, gaming tax, transfer tax and cross-border VAT. As the EU Digital Identity Wallet arrives and more authorities issue credentials to Business Wallets, "the invoice is the declaration" can become the default — not the exception.