site.btaLv 2,300 Mln Added to State Budget Thanks to Institutions' Concerted Efforts

Lv 2,300 Mln Added to State Budget Thanks to Institutions' Concerted Efforts

Sofia, September 3 (BTA) - A total of 2,300 million leva have been added to the State budget thanks to the concerted efforts of the prosecution service, the Ministry of Interior (MoI), the State Agency for National Security (SANS), the National Revenue Agency (NRA) and the National Customs Agency (NCA) to suppress corruption offences, financial and tax fraud and smuggling, the prosecuting magistracy said in a press release on Wednesday.

Criminal offences which have inflicted losses exceeding 145 million leva on the State budget are being investigated. The NCA has collected extra excise duties amounting to 129.8 million leva, and the NRA has prevented offences against the financial system for nearly 250 million leva, the press release says.

Since the beginning of the year, the prosecution offices have instituted 239 pre-trial proceedings in connection with tax offences, 739 criminal proceedings for holding excise goods without an excise label and 136 smuggling cases. Seventy-nine persons have been convicted of tax offences, and the fines imposed on them aggregate 34,600 leva. Sixty-seven persons have received convictions for smuggling and have been fined a total of 939,500 leva. Five hundred persons have been sentenced for holding untaxed excise goods, with the fines for this offence totalling 228,201 leva.

As a result of an agreement reached between the prosecution service and the NRA, a Specialized Unit for Investigation of Organized Crime Group-Related Tax Offences has been functioning at the Specialized Prosecution Office since the beginning of 2015. Since that Unit was set up, 15 new pre-trial proceedings have been instituted and ten implementations have been carried out. The Specialized Unit now monitors 59 pre-trial proceedings. Five indictments against organized crime group set up for the purpose of perpetrating tax offences have been brought before the Specialized Criminal Court, and the proven losses inflicted on the State budget under these proceedings exceed 22.6 million leva. Overall, the budget presumably incurred 180 million leva-plus losses under the monitored 59 proceedings, and this amount tends to increase in the course of the investigations and collecting new evidence.

The NRA has collected 1,170 million leva more between January and August 2015 compared to the same period of last year. The NRA, MoI, SANS and prosecution authorities have prevented attempted tax offences in 19 joint operations since the beginning of the year. The NRA has detected clues of offences committed in respect of 500 companies and individuals and has approached the prosecution service for undertaking criminal prosecution. These presumed offences inflicted a nearly 250 million leva detriment on the financial system.

The NRA fiscal control unit conducted nearly 180,000 checks of the movement of 600,000 tonnes of evasion-prone goods until the end of August. Eighteen persons were referred to the prosecution service in connection with offences involving violations of the evasion-prone goods regime. One hundred and fifty tonnes of goods transported in breach of the law have been confiscated since the beginning of the year.