Tax offences, penalties and procedure

Today public expenditures of government are continously increasing owing to the development of conception of social state. Taxes constitute Government's greatest source of income in relation to meeting its public expenditures. Government impose a set of obligations on taxpayers in order to collect taxes in full and due time. In the case of the breach of these obligations, taxpayers may face administrative fines or penalties of imprisoment. The main purposes of this work is to set forth the prosecutable offences of tax evasion, violation of secrecy of taxes, fullfiling obligations on behalf of taxpayers and failing to inspect cultivation and inventory declaration, with all their elements and current arguments; and to clearly set out the disorganized provisions of Tax Procedure Code and Turkish Penal Code in order to consider misconceptions and to build consensus on the concepts by establishing the differences between tax offences and misdemeanours. In this work, first of all general defination of crime and elements of crime have been established and then actions constitute tax offences, sanctions for these offences and criminal procedure have been presented. In order this work to be orginezed, topics of tax loss and irregularity will not be addressed saving prosecutable tax offences. To make this work objective, all text books, theses and articles and all resources concerning tax offences have been reviewed and the decisions of Turkish Supreme Court of Appeals (Yargıtay), Turkish Counsil of State (Danıştay) Turkish Constitutional (Anayasa Mahkemesi), European Court of Human Rights have been cited for better understanding of common practice.