A box forgotten? Income that you have not declared by mistake? Charges giving right to a tax credit that have remained forgotten? Don’t panic: if the deadlines are now well past, you can correct your 2023 declaration from 2 August. A possibility that some taxpayers would take advantage of to optimize their tax advice.
54,300 corrections in 2013. More than double in 2016: 110,000 corrections, in 2016. Then three times more, 300,000 corrections online, in 2018… and more than 600,000 corrections, in 2021 as in 2022! For the past few years, the heading Income declarations corrected online after receipt of opinions, which appears in the annual activity report of the Directorate General of Public Finances (DGFiP), has risen sharply.
What does this statistic correspond to? Every year, at the beginning of August, the DGFiP opens an online correction space for the declaration of income. Objective: to avoid those who would have forgotten to declare expenses entitling them to tax benefits, salaries or other resources of rectify the situation directly on impots.gouv.fr. And not by sending a new declaration by mail.
Taxes 2023: how to correct your declaration after the deadline?
Online correction has even panicked the counters with 800,000 corrections in 2020, a year necessarily special with the health crisis. The DGFiP thus recognizes a significant increase in corrective declarations made online during the 2020 confinement, before a drop in 2021 and then they were the subject of a very slight increase in 2022.
The appearance of a certain fraud in tax credits and reductions
An easy correction, which finds its audience… and even a little more according to Anne Guyot-Welke, national secretary of Solidaires Finances Publiques, the first trade union of the DGFiP: We have reported difficulties [ la direction, NDLR] compared to the telecorrection which comes posteriori. This generates a number of correctionswhich generates additional work for DGFiP agents and a certain amount of “fraud”. Especially with the question of tax reductions and credits.
How to explain this fraud of a new kind? Before there was an a priori control of declarations, but it is melting like snow in the sun, explains Anne Guyot-Welke. The first level of control is less and less effective. And as we claim less and less supporting documents… This opens up the possibility for some to take advantage of the vagueness.
Those who may have more knowledge of impots.gouv.fr have fun with this system
For the time being, the first union of the DGFiP mainly raises a fraud of opportunity. Clearly an opportunistic optimization… The Defender of Rights has already pointed this out: depending on the level of comfort with these dematerialized tools, some overlook certain rights [notamment les crdits et rductions d’impt oublis, NDLR]. And conversely those who have perhaps more mastery have fun with this system.
Up to 1174euros lost! These 5 tax credits and reductions that you forget to claim
Asked about the progress of the online correction and the fear of growing fiscal opportunism, the DGFiP initially tempers any explosion of corrections. On the one hand because the number of online corrections fell after the Covid-19 health crisis. On the other hand: The figure of 600,000 online corrections also includes corrigenda (several corrections by the same taxpayer), this figure compared to the total number of original declarations declared online or taxed automatically, i.e. 39.8 million, shows that these corrections represent a proportionately limited volume.
As to tax refund fraud attemptsthe DGFiP specified in a response to MoneyVox from the end of April 2023 that the online processes for filing initial declarations, in the spring, and corrective declarations, each summer and autumn, were significantly strengthened in 2022 through various IT checks to anticipate fraud attempts.
Significant strengthening of preventive controls in 2023
These fears of a control judged to be more lax than in the past, expressed this spring by the Solidaires Finances Publiques union, intervene in a tense context due to additional declaration in 2023: the traditional declaration of income, is added this year for owners the declaration of real estate and their occupants. An abundant source of questions for agents of the Public Treasury.
The DGFiP thus states, in a response sent to MoneyVox at the end of April: In 2023, new controls will significantly strengthen the system preventive controls already exist.
Property tax, income tax… Don’t miss all the dates until the end of 2023