Morocco Probes Foreign Firms’ Financial Transfers Amid Tax Scrutiny

The controllers focused their attention on companies active in the industrial and high-tech sectors. They analyzed service contracts, particularly those related to the exploitation of intellectual property rights or the secondment of personnel, whose remunerations are transferred abroad, according to sources at Hespress.

In collaboration with the transfer pricing and special operations control unit of the General Tax Directorate, and the Customs and Indirect Tax Administration (ADII), the Exchange Office agents also scrutinized royalties paid for the exploitation of intangible assets, as well as internal management fees to assess compliance with market prices.

These investigations revealed practices of tax manipulation and violations of foreign exchange regulations, the same sources specify, emphasizing that several foreign subsidiaries operating in Morocco are suspected of over-invoicing aimed at artificially reducing their taxable profits. A tax evasion that does not say its name.

The controllers verified bank transfers made by these subsidiaries to their parent company to evade Moroccan taxes. These verification operations should lead to tax adjustments. They follow others that focused on tax declarations of Moroccan subsidiaries of foreign companies, revealing irregularities in the calculation of profits transferred to foreign parent companies.