Focus efforts on the biggest frauds and ease the pressure on the middle classes. Gabriel Attal presented this Tuesday his plan to fight tax evasion focused on reinforcing the media to detect “the most elaborate plots, which often have international implications,” explained the Delegate Minister of Public Accounts.
“In recent years, the tax authorities have worked a lot on files such as the ‘Panama Papers,’ transmitted by whistleblowers through consortia of journalists. I want France to produce its own ‘papers,'” Gabriel Attal explained in the columns of World.
To achieve this, it intends to have a new tax intelligence service that will be integrated into the National Directorate of Intelligence and Customs Investigations (DNRED). Equipped with a hundred “elite agents” at the end of the five-year period, this cell will be fully dedicated to the fight against the most important and complex international frauds. Some of its members may come from existing intelligence services. The first will enter service in 2025.
Espionage, data capture and beaconing
The new intelligence service will have reinforced means to achieve its objectives. While Tracfin, Bercy’s financial intelligence unit, cannot currently use tax evasion intelligence techniques “except when the case involves organized crime,” the new service will be able to use “wiretapping, data capture, beacon placement.”
Thus, it will be able to search for information “in non-cooperative states or territories”, of which “we have no information or transparency”, such as Panama or the Bahamas, said Gabriel Attal.
The agents of this cell will also be able to recruit human sources that work for financial institutions and remunerate them in exchange for information on people who harbor undeclared funds abroad.
Source: BFM TV
