False and Fictitious Invoices

IOTA Area Group “Treatment of Specific Industries – Construction” decided to form a Task Team with the purpose of studying and reporting on false/fictitious invoices. A questionnaire was sent to all IOTA Members in June 2008 to obtain details on how they handled the problem. Based on the replies from the 23 Member tax administrations who responded the Task Team compiled information on the different practices and methods.

The basic idea was not to gather detailed information on procedures and legislation from every country, but to present a comprehensive overview showing how tax administrations (can) act concerning false/fictitious invoices, and which tools/audits they can use to detect and tackle them.

Therefore, this report does not aim to be a good practice guide, but rather it seeks to educate the reader on the subject and give them an overview of possible measures that could be used. Any proposals from readers for amendments or the inclusion of additional information that will increase the value of the document would be appreciated and should be sent to the IOTA Technical Advisory Committee.

During the development of the material used in this publication, input was provided by the Area Group members from the majority of IOTA tax administrations, who supported the efforts to collect experiences in the field of false and fictitious invoices. We would like to thank them all and more specifically the Task Team members who compiled this report: Malgorzata Brzoza (Poland), François-Xavier Besnard-Mangin (France), Tuomo Karvonen (Finland), Victoria Moraleda Garcia (Spain), Morten Mørch Sørensen (Denmark), Mike Pope (UK), Kathleen Redmond (Ireland), Tor Sandby (Norway), Marco van der Waal (the Netherlands) and Bojana Znidarsic (Slovenia).