Supervising European accounts too expensive?

In the daily Corriere del Ticino the vice president of the European Policy Forum in London, Tito Tettamanti, defends with reference to a study Switzerland's financial policy, which levies a 15 percent tax on interest accrued on Swiss deposits and denies access to capital gains. "International supervision of accounts doesn't work, as a study carried out by the European Policy Forum in November proves. The introduction of such controls at the 1,243 European and Swiss banks would cost 753 million euros plus a further 693 million years for implementation per year. Toughening these controls to the extent the EU demands would double the costs. By contrast the system of taxing interest profits directly at the source functions extremely well and costs very little. This raises the question: ... Why do bureaucrats want to stick their noses inefficiently and at great expense into the tax affairs of private people? I have an idea, but I'll leave it to the reader to come up with the answer, which is obvious."

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