The Austrian parliament accepted the bill amending the Fiscal Criminal Act 2014 on July 2014. The draft bill aims at finish the exercise of partial disclosures as the current rules allow taxpayers to benefit from a repeated voluntary disclosure regarding the same tax claim. The draft bill also specifies that a taxpayer must carefully submit all relevant documents on every instance of tax evasion in order to benefit from a voluntary disclosure and to avoid legal consequences.
Furthermore, the amending bill presents an additional penalty payment for cases where taxpayers only start a voluntary disclosure in connection with a tax audit or other investigations by the tax authorities. In such cases, in order to still benefit from a voluntary disclosure, taxpayers must pay an additional amount of 5% of the evaded tax.
The additional penalty payment shall be 15% of the evaded tax if the amount of evaded tax exceeds EUR 33,000, 20% if the amount of evaded tax exceeds EUR 100,000 and 30% if the evaded amount exceeds EUR 250,000.
