The Directorate General of Taxes (DGI) has intensified its tax controls, targeting in particular professionals practicing liberal professions suspected of tax fraud. By exploiting data from their banking transactions and their publications on social networks, tax inspectors highlighted significant discrepancies between declared income and lavish expenses, particularly during trips abroad.
Doctors and engineers were subjected to heavy tax audits by the Directorate General of Taxes after it was established that they had provided false declarations to the tax authorities, including concerning income and expenses supported by invoices. The DGI controllers in fact provided these taxpayers who were protesting against the amount of the tax audit with precise data on their high expenses for lavish vacations spent outside Morocco, the cost of which was between 200,000 and 270,000 dirhams.
Hespress sources indicate that auditors detected the possibility of tax fraud in a doctor’s declarations regarding his tax status, due to the large gap between the value of low income declared to the tax authorities and the total amount of his expenses real, confirming that the details of these amounts have been verified using the right of access to information from banking establishments. Indeed, the verification of transactions carried out with the Moroccan bank card of this professional, revealed expenses linked to hotel reservations and purchases of clothing, jewelry and luxury watches, totaling 270,000 dirhams for a vacation of 10 days with his wife and daughter in European destinations.
The same sources report that excessive expenses, having highlighted a large discrepancy between the real financial situation and the tax declarations, also brought down two engineers, after this was verified by examining their bank statements and their accounts at the inside and outside Morocco. These srouces add that these two engineers spent huge sums of money on vacations to high-end tourist destinations in Southeast Asia and Europe, including Greece, Italy, Monaco, Spain, Ibiza and in other countries. Tax auditors use electronic channels for exchanging information with the competent services of the Foreign Exchange Office and the General Directorate of Customs and Indirect Taxes to determine the value of travel expenses incurred by the two aforementioned taxpayers, as it was found that their expenses abroad exceeded the authorized limits. Therefore, it is emphasized, this data was transmitted to the aforementioned authorities so that they could carry out their own research into possible violations of exchange rules.
-It should be noted that an audit previously carried out by the General Directorate of Taxes targeted taxpayers exercising certain liberal professions, after having received information on their recourse to the purchase of works of art with the aim of placing there their money, since most of them use cash in their transactions and do not report the actual number.
Hespress’ sources also revealed that tax auditors have adopted new techniques to detect fraudsters by tracking and analyzing information from their social media accounts, which now provide important data on them since they do not hesitate not to publish the details of their lives there, which would allow the control services to assess the validity of the tax declarations that they submit to the tax services, emphasizing that people exercising liberal professions have been placed at the head of the targeted groups by the aforementioned control techniques, given that a certain number of them declare income well below the nature of their activities.
