The coronavirus crisis did not prevent tax audits: 7.8 billion euros were recovered in 2020, according to the annual report of the General Directorate of Public Finances, published at the end of August. During the first confinement, from March 17 to May 11, 2020, Bercy’s services focused on “High-stakes heritage files”. Indeed, tax avoidance remains a common practice in France to enrich personal or family assets.
The repressive arsenal has however hardened since the entry into force of the automatic exchange of information between States and the disappearance, in France, of the service for processing corrective declarations – the STDR allowed until the end of 2017 to regularize a delicate tax situation with the guarantee of not going through the criminal case. Now, if a fraudster wants to avoid heavy penalties, he can plead guilty. In 2020, the amounts of fines related to appearances on prior acknowledgment of guilt (CRPC) were multiplied by ten: 3.4 million euros, against 0.3 million euros in 2019.
If the procedures evolve, the price to pay to get out of tax fraud remains high. This is the bitter experience of Claire D., whom we portrayed five years ago, during the revelation of the “Panama Papers”. With her family, she was one of the thousand French, with diverse profiles, from the poker player to the heiress, through the business manager, who had appealed to the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
Claire D. (whose name and company have been anonymized by The world) is a Parisian setting without history. When his father died in 2013, he bequeathed to his four daughters the currency equivalent of several hundred thousand euros hidden in Switzerland. The sisters accept the bequest and place it in Panama, in separate companies, each being held in secrecy as long as the others do not want to declare themselves to the tax authorities.
But after a few months, Claire D. no longer wants to live with the risk of a scandal breaking out, and decides to regularize her situation with the French administration. It is the beginning of a long road, moral and administrative, family and professional. Five years after the start of this process and while the regularization has finally been settled, Claire D. traces the difficulties in getting out of the mechanisms of tax evasion.
Guilty bundles
The first step is to close the company in Panama and bring the heritage back to Switzerland, trying not to lose any on the way. “There, the intermediary who made you create a company thousands of kilometers away no longer helps you, whereas it is very complicated to disentangle everything. You have to understand where exactly the money is, and trace everything to report it to the tax authorities, whether it is stocks, gold, cash … “ Except that, whatever the nature of the heritage, no Swiss bank wants it since the scandals of HSBC and UBS. It is out of the question for banking establishments to associate their name with a new case of tax evasion.
Claire D. ends up finding a bank that accepts to house the guilty bundles in one of its coffers while waiting to repatriate them to France. In the meantime, she has a French bailiff see that the amounts being regularized are indeed in full in Geneva, in order to obtain a receipt to be able to cross the border. “We drove back and forth with my husband, with the cash in the safe, which had to be changed in Paris because the French bank only took euros in the end…”
The step of declaring sums to the tax authorities is ultimately simpler: all you have to do is register on the Internet and make an appointment at Bercy, describes Claire D. As she is personally at the origin of the Panamanian assembly, its regularization enters the box of “active” tax evasion, which is more penalized than when it is “suffered”. She claims to have paid around 70% of the sums received from her father to the tax authorities. The rest she spent “For shopping, for small jobs, so that this money does not work”, she justifies, in order not to add speculation to fraud.
Family broken up and career put on hold
By paying the price for serenity, Claire D. made a financial choice but also a human one. “When you regularize yourself, the tax authorities want to know everything, where the money comes from, since when … He goes up the succession track quite quickly”, she explains. In her family, it is the commotion when she announces her decision to declare this inheritance to the recovery cell. Because opening a regulatory file in Bercy amounts to twisting the arm of the rest of his family to do the same.
Claire D. is the bearer of a second bad news: if The world pledged to keep its identity hidden, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which coordinated the investigation, released part of the data from the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca, containing the names of the shareholders 215,000 offshore structures… including those of Claire D. and her sisters.
A family council is convened to decide on the course to be taken. The surprise effect passed, Claire D. tries to convince her sisters to follow her approach: “We weren’t raised like that. “ The debates are intensifying: “One of my sisters, Manon, told me that she didn’t give a damn about my integrity, she chokes again. The lawyer had to talk about the risk of prison [en France, la fraude fiscale peut être punie de cinq ans d’emprisonnement] to rally it. For her, it was necessary to preserve the reputation and the heritage. “
In passing, she learns that the money comes from a factory owned by her great-grandparents, money from which her cousins also took advantage without their ever having spoken about it. Claire D. rereads the history of her paternal family with a fresh eye. “I don’t know if he was inconsistent or selfish when he made this decision, but my father was above all a bourgeois son”, she sums up. Repentant, the former fraudster, who hesitated a few months before declaring herself to the tax authorities, admits to still feeling guilty: “I no longer take an important position, I no longer work in the administration or with committed personalities, as in the past. I would be too scared that one day it would be known and that it would harm them. “
Honor the father’s name
If she has the support of her husband and her children, to whom she explained after several weeks of procrastination the origin of the heavy climate in the family, Claire D. now only has reports “Cordial”, understand distant, with one of his sisters. Contacted, the latter did not wish to answer us.
The other, who explained to us that he strongly opposed the regularization, and therefore to Claire, not to “Dirty” the name of the father, recognizes that she left almost all the inheritance to Bercy but still refuses the term tax evasion: “Because it was shared and the decision had to be collegial, the money was blocked in Switzerland. “ Youngest child and very close to her father, Manon S. affirms bluntly: ” If I could redo it, I would. I am not the one who swings and takes everyone in his fall. I took for my father, I honored his name. “ Today, she no longer speaks with any of her sisters.
The fourth, sick with cancer, died before knowing the end of the story with the tax authorities. For her too, Claire D. testifies, the family breakup was over: “She asked not to be buried in the family vault with dad and rest in the church on the side of mom’s family, people who knew lean cows, but of great righteousness. “