Moroccan Tax Authority Cracks Down on $3 Billion Fake Invoice Fraud

The DGI aims to eradicate the scourge of fake invoices. "The tax authorities will now rely on a triptych centered around Articles 146 (supporting documents for expenses), 192 (criminal penalties) and 231 (Procedure for the application of criminal penalties to tax offenses) of the general tax code," to fight against fake invoices, wrote l’Économiste, stressing that "this scourge weighs 30 billion dirhams, including 5 billion dirhams of VAT that have never been paid upstream by phantom structures".

These are mainly invoices not declared to the tax authorities and corresponding to operations that never existed. To better fight against this phenomenon, its criminalization has been decided. Thus, the Director General of Taxes now has the possibility to directly seize the public prosecutor, who will in turn seize the investigating judge with the tax administration’s complaint. In the same vein, a blacklist of identifiers of defective suppliers in terms of tax obligations will be posted on the DGI website, and will be regularly updated following a judgment that has acquired the force of res judicata, after the procedure relating to the criminalization of this tax offense, specifies the newspaper.

In addition to this possibility, there is "the drying up of the sources at the origin of these forgeries by sanctioning the issuer, who now risks prison, and the buyer through the rejection of the deductibility of non-probative invoices". This measure takes into account any invoice issued by a supplier who does not comply with his declarative and tax payment obligations and who is not officially engaged in any activity. Furthermore, two deficiencies noted by the tax authorities will be enough to reject the deduction of invoices of convenience in terms of income tax, corporate tax and VAT, the same source points out.