Moroccan Tax Authorities Launch Crackdown on ’Ghost Companies’ in Major Cities

Thanks to this coordination of the DGI, joint interventions between tax inspectors and authority agents (mokaddem and chioukh) are taking place, in order to locate the units in a situation of evasion and their deposits or production spaces, particularly on the outskirts of large cities, starting with the economic capital. The first phase of these campaigns has started in Casablanca, Hespress reports, adding that they will extend to other provinces and prefectures within the mentioned regions.

To carry out their mission, the inspectors relied on reports from the collection monitoring service of the Accounting and Collection Department of the Tax Directorate, containing information on companies in a situation of evasion that had announced their change of headquarters in low-circulation newspapers, while ignoring other legal procedures.

After receiving from the tax administration a long list of companies that had changed their headquarters without informing its competent services and had no longer filed their quarterly and annual returns, the inspectors went to the former addresses of these companies, which had disappeared from the "radar" of the directorate. They found that some of them had left their premises without initiating judicial liquidation proceedings.

Subsequently, other administrations, such as the National Social Security Fund (CNSS) and the Customs and Indirect Taxes Administration, accompanied the coordination of the Directorate General of Taxes, so that it could trace the activity of the companies that had disappeared from the radar of its inspectors.

The harvest proved to be good. The inspectors were able to identify 47 companies that had changed their headquarters without reporting it. For now, they are examining the documents of these companies.