The Italian Supreme Court filed judgment no. 912/2012 on January 13, 2012 in which it issued the above-described decision.
The case at hand concerned a taxpayer who had deducted expenses allegedly proven by petrol receipts. The Italian Tax Police, however, conducted a series of inspections and concluded that such receipts were false.
In particular, the Tax Police ascertained from the documents provided by the taxpayer that the latter had consumed an average of 1,73 km per liter, in comparison with an average of 15 km per liter that the car manufacturer said that the car could do.
The managers of the petrol stations at which the taxpayer had refueled stated that they had not signed such petrol receipts and that, therefore, the signatures of authorization which had been affixed to the contested receipts were not theirs. The Tax Police also veirified that the receipts also indicated dates in which the petrol stations – which did not have self-service facilities – were closed.
The Supreme Court Judges confirmed, therefore, that the appellant’s conviction on the grounds that the latter had committed the offence of making a fraudulent declaration with false documents (which consists in using invoices or other documents for inexistent transactions for the purpose of avoiding income tax or value added tax, as well as indicating in the annual tax return fictitious costs)
The Judges excluded, in the light of the above, that the appellant had committed the lesser offence of making a fraudulent declaration through other artifices, since it had been proven that the above-described transactions had never taken place.
