The annual UIC Finance Committee took place on 6 June at UIC. It brought together the Finance Directors of the UIC European active members or their representatives and gave an opportunity for the eight working groups to report on their work.

The meeting was chaired by Thierry Béra, UIC Finance Director in the absence of David Sitruk, SNCF, President of the Finance Committee. He explained that within the QMS rules, starting from next year, the Finance Committee will migrate into the Finance Platform. The meeting started with a presentation by a guest speaker from the OSJD Finance Group, Kounka Kirkova, who explained the work of the OSJD and as well as work on joint leaflets.

Further presentations included reports conducted by the following groups:

• PATRIC (audit passenger group) during which the speaker presented the 2018 and 2019 audit campaigns and most frequent problems
• RCF 1 (Accounting and Financial Regulations – Passenger Working Party) who spoke about an updated version of the leaflet 301 into IRS
• RCF 2 (Accounting and Financial Regulations – Freight Working Party), mentioned the upcoming publication of leaflet 304 into IRS30304
• RCF 3 (Financial relations between railway undertakings – Principles and terms of application) reported on the work of the group with ODC (Office of Debt Clearance)
• The Finance Group Coordinator explained the changes and publications of IRS
• ODC (Office of Debt Clearance) went through the Creditor’s Forum in Belgrade in 2018 and its results
• The Statistics Group presented the new IRS30398 and statistics publications
• The Taxation Group talked about the aim to work on national and international fiscal problems and define unified interpretation on international tax matters
• The Legal Group, which works on member requests, presented the current request from MERITS Project, GDPR, and many others

UIC presentations were delivered by Vincent Vu, coordinator of the UIC Asia-Pacific Region on the region’s activities, the state-of-the-art of its railway sector and Vision 2050, and by Francis Bédel, CDO, on the UIC Digital Platform presenting a number of UIC Digital activities within the Roadmap 2019.