Tax crimes in the Italian legislation
Tax crimes in the Italian legislation

Summary/Abstract: In spite of the fact that tax crimes are offences mala prohibita, rather than mala per se, a social consensus has long existed according to which certain behaviours that harm the state budget should be stipulated by criminal legislation. According to some data, penalties for failure to pay dues to the state existed even in ancient Egypt. The only things that have changed over time were the number of tax-related criminal offences and the type of sanctions prescribed for these offences. Most certainly, such solutions were conditioned by concrete social circumstances. Nowadays, all legislations provide for tax criminal offences. In some countries they are a part of the primary criminal legislation, in others they are provided for by the secondary criminal legislation, while some countries have separate regulations, which in the matter relating to tax criminal offences represent lex specialis. Given that it contains specific solutions, the subject of the analysis of this paper are the provisions of the Italian Law on Tax Crimes, which in addition to the substantive criminal law, also regulate some mechanisms of the criminal procedure law.

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