November 16, 2023.- The Tax Agency has initiated yesterday a coordinated action in 15 autonomous communities against tax fraud in the timber trade sector. The operation, called ‘Llamera’, involves the initiation of inspection checks on 84 companies and 37 related natural persons (partners, administrators and people from the family environment).
The ‘Llamera’ operation, coordinated by the Inspection Department of the Tax Agency, has involved the participation of more than 350 officials (more than 320 of the Inspection Area, including personnel of the Computer Audit Units, and more than thirty officials of the Customs Surveillance Service of the Agency), as well as with the support of police agents.
The device deployed yesterday allowed the personation in 88 premises of the inspected societies that are located in Andalusia (7), Aragon (6), Asturias (2), Baleares (1), Canarias (9), Cantabria (2), Castilla-La Mancha (2), Castilla y León (6), Catalonia (8), Extremadura (1), Galicia (12), Madrid (8), La Rioja (1), Murcia (2) and Valencian Community (21).
The objective of this operation is the verification of companies dedicated to the marketing of timber – including derived products, such as doors, beams, boards, etc. – in which a series of indications of the existence of a submerged economy and fiscal fraud have been analyzed.
Hidden Sales Outcrop in Partners' Wealth
Within the set of taxpayers analyzed, companies have been identified whose partners present risks of unjustified capital increases, increases that could be due to hidden sales of the entity that were materializing in capital increases of its partners. This risk affects the members of more than half of the companies that have begun to be inspected.
When making the selection of companies to be checked, it has also been taken into account that many of the linked natural persons have external signs of wealth that could constitute indications of concealment of income, such as the rental of security boxes or in some case the use of personal bank cards with heavy expenses.
In turn, and as established in the Guidelines of the Control Plan of 2023, when designing this operation, special attention has been paid to the intensive use of cash as a method of collection.
In the case of companies under audit, the low weight of card collection is given by the characteristics of the wholesale trade, where a large part of the income is received by transfer.
However, in some of these companies there is the circumstance that the weight of the cash entered in bank accounts was also particularly low, so that beyond the charges made by transfer, which will have to be reviewed from now on after the personations, the importance in these cases of the cash income not entered in accounts that may have been used by the inspected companies to make, in turn, payments in ‘B’.
In the previous analysis it was also possible to analyze the case of several companies subject to verification where card collections and cash entered into accounts already accounted for about 80% of the declared invoicing. Therefore, there are clear indications that, by adding, in turn, the transfers received and the cash not entered into accounts, the actual invoicing would be clearly exceeding the declared one.
Personations and tax fraud
Through personations such as those carried out in this operation, the Agency manages to access information of vital importance for the performance of the inspection work (documentation and actual accounting or ancillary information, including computer information processing systems). Now, within the framework of the open inspections and which will continue to be developed in the coming months from this initial obtaining of evidence, all the documentation obtained will be analyzed.
The experience of similar operations carried out previously has shown that this system of action allows a more effective fight against the submerged economy or any other non-compliance susceptible to regularization.
The Guidelines of the Control Plan of 2023 emphasize the need for the presence of the Tax Agency in companies of sectors and business models in which there is a risk of existence of a submerged economy. This operation, in addition, is accompanied by the sending of ‘warning letters’ to other companies in the same sector and the carrying out of visits of the Inspection Area for the ‘in situ’ control of formal and registration obligations.
Sectoral macro-operations
With the ‘Llamera’ operation, there are already 23 coordinated sectoral macro-operations deployed by the Agency in the last decade, with a result until the end of last year of more than 2,000 completed files and revenues amounting to 386 million euros. This type of action, in addition to facilitating the detection and regularization of tax fraud, allows to convey a dissuasive message to the groups involved in these practices, which have an impact on public coffers and seriously distort competition in the affected sector itself.