Apgaulingas buhalterinės apskaitos tvarkymas kaip mokesčių vengimo būdas: administracinė ir baudžiamoji atsakomybė

Abstract

The fraudulent management of finance accounting is one of the most common means of tax evasion. The legal acts of Lithuania lay criminal and administrative responsibility for this infringement. However the legal acts are not harmonized with each other, there is no clear division between different kinds of responsibility. In order to avoid the consequences of gaps of the laws, there is a need to pay reasonable attention to the issues concerning the administrative and criminal responsibility for the infringements of tax evasion. There is a need to form logical and harmonized system of means of responsibility which could help to react to the threats to state‘s and societies and every person’s financial interests on time. The criminal and administrative responsibilities are not harmonized with each other and therefore some problems occur. One of the problems is that the dispositions of parts 3 and 5 of article 173¹ of Code of Infringements of Administrative Law of Republic of Lithuania (CIAL) establish the situation where the scope of administrative infringement collides with scope of criminal act creating the competition between administrative and criminal responsibility. That means that the analogical infringement could fall under either administrative or criminal responsibility. In order to harmonize criminal and administrative norms in this field, there is need to remove the indication of exact amounts of money which offenders are trying to avoid from the dispositions of parts 3 and 5 of article 173¹ of CIAL.
There is also need to remove disproportion between criminal and administrative sanctions. The draft CIAL does not provide the constitution of the fraudulent management of finance accounting at all. The article 188 of draft CIAL provides only general constitution of this infringement, where the responsibility for the infringement of finance accounting legal acts is provided. Such a proposal is not rational because intentional and negligent infringements are joined into one group.
Such a constitution will not allow choosing proper sanction for different gravity infringements. We suggest that the constitution as it is in draft CIAL could be used for reckless and minor infringements and the fraudulent management of finance accounting should be punished more strictly. Therefore there is need to embed the constitution of the fraudulent management of finance accounting in the draft CIAL and to harmonize it with the article 222 of Criminal Code of Lithuania. We suggest that the constitution of the fraudulent management of finance accounting could be formulated as follows: “the fraudulent management of finance accounting in order to avoid or avoiding taxes is punished with the fine from x to y Litas to natural persons and from q to z Litas to legal persons.”