“A useful tool” to recover “a very significant part” of the fraud attributed to a company: the Minister of Public Accounts Gabriel Attal defended Wednesday before the Senate the interest of judicial conventions of public interest (CJIP).
Created by a 2016 law, the CJIP allows companies suspected of corruption, influence peddling or tax evasion to escape criminal prosecution by paying a fine.
In recent years, heavyweights such as Airbus (2.1 billion euros in 2020), Google (500 million euros in 2021) or McDonald’s (1.25 billion in June 2022) have thus gone to the fund to put an end to investigations judicial.
The CJIPs allow the State to ensure that public finances cover a very significant part of the alleged fraud, argued Gabriel Attal, questioned by the Communist senator Eric Bocquet during a debate in the Senate on the fight against tax fraud and evasion.
I always wonder where is the public interest in this device, had wondered a few minutes earlier the elected representative of the North.
The fines recovered do not represent the totality of the sums evaded and this method of negotiation suggests to ordinary mortals that the tax law does not apply in the same way depending on whether you are powerful or miserable, argued Eric Bocquet.
When you enter into a legal battle, we sometimes fight against large companies which have a legal weapon and (…) can make things last, replied Gabriel Attal, for whom 40% of the amounts of fraud recovered each year by public finances come from the DIVN, the department of Bercy which controls companies with a turnover of more than 400 million euros.
The succession of hearings and appeals can also end up lowering the amount that we ultimately manage to recover, he added.
By making it possible to recover money, what is more quickly, the CJIP is therefore a useful tool in several respects, insisted the Minister of Public Accounts.
Questioned a few minutes later by the socialist senator Victorin Lurel, Gabriel Attal also stressed that the CJIPs were approved by the judge.
These agreements are largely negotiated by the national financial prosecutor’s office and then the judge must validate them. So these tools are obviously reviewed and ultimately validated by the judiciary, he argued.
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In his question, Mr. Lurel had expressed his fears of drifting from the very philosophy of tax control.
Certainly the development of a preventive logic is commendable, but giving priority to the absolution of fraudsters seems to me a slippery and therefore dangerous path, worried the elected representative of Guadeloupe.
At the end of October, an information mission from the Senate had already concluded that in the face of the saturation of justice, it was necessary to support the deployment of the CJIPs.
During the debate on Wednesday evening, Gabriel Attal also recognized the need to improve the assessment of the amounts that escape the State due to tax evasion, and recalled his intention to present a plan before the end of the first quarter. fight against tax, social and customs fraud.
Another priority: to help the prosecutors prioritize among the influx of files which resulted from the relaxation of the Bercy lock in 2018. Since this reform, the tax authorities are indeed obliged to transmit to justice all facts of fraud above 100,000 euros.