Tax evasion crimes

This study examines criminal tax evasion, the key component of Turkish tax penal law. It is composed of two parts: (i) First, it tries to provide a new insight into these offences with old but lesser-used legal research methods. Particularly, the first two canons of von Savigny, i.e. grammatical and historical, are employed in an extensive manner. In this context, it tracks the advancement of the idea of 'evasion' and related terminology. Philological studies and comparative law perspective show that a chain of misunderstandings extended from the late Ottoman period to early Republican period caused a very problematic perception of tax evasion. The study concludes that the contemporary issues regarding these offences, such as the distinction between tax evasion and tax avoidance, can be solved only after the long-established but wrongly constructed evasion idea is corrected. (ii) Secondly, the study examines criminal tax evasion within the scope of positive law. To this end, first the fiscal and criminal policies behind the rules are discussed and then the norms are deconstructed with a useful tool, the German doctrine of crime (Verbrechenslehre) and each element of crime is isolated and subjected to in-depth review. Many confusions experienced by tax practitioners and tax lawyers are addressed thanks to this pure criminal law perspective.