The Minister of Economy and Finance, Nadia Fettah Alaoui, answering a written question, addressed by Khalid Setti, of the House of Councilors on behalf of the National Union of Moroccan Labor (UNTM), revealed that the Management General of Taxation found that some companies were using one of the towns in the Southern Region as the address for their head office.
This, while exercising their commercial, industrial or service activities outside these provinces. This situation has prompted the Directorate General of Taxation to strengthen control over this category of taxable persons who evade payment of taxes, thus legitimizing their obtaining of a tax certificate. The latter giving them the right to participate in and enjoy public contracts.
The government official indicated that measures have been taken to strengthen the publication of the regulatory memorandum, issued on July 28, 2017, establishing the principle of equality with the rest of the national companies in the documents necessary to participate in public transactions in order to limit any attempt to maintain the granted privileges.
The new procedures, according to the minister, include certificates of authorized transaction number and approval of product and fiscal-legal status. She added that in order to facilitate and standardize the procedures for issuing certificates to companies residing in the southern regions of the Kingdom, they are now obtained on the basis of a request submitted by the persons concerned.
In addition, and as part of the digitization of procedures for obtaining the tax certificates necessary for companies to participate in public contracts, it has become necessary for the companies concerned to file their tax declarations. They could not complete these steps and obtain supporting documents and other documents without a correct tax status, confirmed Nadia Fettah Alaoui.
In this context and within the framework of the broadening of the tax base as well as the contribution to the achievement of honest competition between the actors concerned and the consecration of the principle of tax justice, the Minister of the Economy and of Finance revealed that the Regional Directorate of Taxes has, since 2018, settled amicable cases for large companies that are located in the southern provinces and carry out their activities, also outside these regions.
Agreements based on data and information obtained from sums of public transactions, and from data on value added tax debts, as well as by the use of information provided by the National Fisheries Office . As for tax control operations, the Minister of Economy and Finance, Nadia Fettah Alaoui indicated that the interests of the General Directorate of Taxes carry them out by checking documents or by field investigations.
The latter often result in the conclusion of friendly agreements between the tax administration and the taxable persons and the extraction of the resulting tax rights. The Minister indicated that the Directorate General of Taxation has been able to resolve the tax situation of some companies that are trying to evade payment of taxes with false headquarters in various cities in the southern regions. Companies that carry out these activities partially or totally outside this region remain, according to Nadia Fettah Alaoui, very limited.