the gray areas of the Attal plan

There will not be a major Attal law against tax evasion, as there was a Sapin law against corruption, but targeted measures. By revealing his plan to World Tuesday, May 9, the Minister Delegate for Public Accounts, Gabriel Attal, explained that “priority” was from “make the ultra-rich and the multinationals pay what they owe”.

If the political objective is clear – to close the sequence of retreats and meet the expectations of social justice –, what to think of the measures announced, and how to separate what is communication from what is new and possibly effective? While awaiting details, these announcements raise as many questions as they are supposed to solve problems. And this, especially since the plan does not include a quantified objective, in terms of expected revenue or criminal prosecution.

Employment, the real announcement of the plan

The novelty of the Attal plan does not lie in the focus of control on high heritage and multinationals, which the minister made his first political argument. These “high-stakes cases”, clearly those who bring in the most money into the coffers of the State, are in fact already the subject of regular and thorough checks by the tax authorities, the Department of National and International Audits in particular carrying out a control in quasi -real time on very large companies. However, the minister promises a 25% increase in controls “on the largest ets”, by the end of the five-year term.

What is new, on the other hand, are the resources made available to tax audits, with the announcement of 1,500 new jobs by 2027. This “rearmament” in human resources control contrasts with the trend of the last ten years, marked by more than 4,000 job cuts. “It’s going in the right direction. says Pascal Saint-Amans, former director of the OECD tax administration and policy center who has become a professor at the University of Lausanne. The number of tax audits had fallen in recent years for lack of resources, but the executive is taking another direction. »

However, no “business plan” is defined in relation to these means: neither financial objectives nor expected results, in terms of reorganizations or criminal proceedings. “The question of budgetary gains for the State is however capital, like that of transmissions to justicepoints out a senior official. The big undercurrent of such a plan is to know if we expect more money, more sanctions, more prosecutions. »

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