Conformity endorsement without controls, accountant's assets confiscated

Yes to the preventive seizure, aimed at the confiscation for equivalent, of the assets of the accountant - equal to the illicit profit made - who put the visa of conformity on VAT returns without carrying out the checks. The professional thus made it possible to generatefalse or non-existent tax credits, which were subsequently used to make undue compensations, through a colleague's submission of the F24 forms submitted, resulting in the non-payment of the amounts due.

The Court of Cassation (judgment 7647/2026) rejected the appeal of the commercialista against the measure applied - for the crime ofundue compensation - as part of a wide-ranging investigation launched by the Santa Maria Capua Vetere public prosecutor's office into tax offences, which had involved several competitors. It was from this element that the defence had started, contesting in particular the determination of the individual shares of enrichment with respect to profit. "With particular regard to the relief for which, in the face of a 'saving profit' characterising the cases considered, the profit achieved in the cases under examination by the commercialist could not - wrote the defence - be identified in the sole fee realised as a result of the professional service rendered". This is 'in the absence of any evidence of a retrocession of money parameterised to the percentage of savings obtained by the client'.

A thesis that the Supreme Court dismantles. The Court recalls, in fact, that in tax offences committed on behalf of a legal person, once the possibility of seizing, in a direct way, the original profit of the offence, consisting of savings of expenses forfeited by the entity, can be ordered, within the quantitative limits of that profit and without the expropriation being duplicated, the pre-emptive seizurefor equivalent, in view of the confiscation provided for by Article 12-bis of Legislative Decree 74/2000. A measure that can be ordered against one or more perpetrators of the criminal conduct, by virtue of the punitive nature of value confiscation, as long as it is within the limits of the profit made by the entity.

Nor did the plea concerning the defect of proportionality between the amount of profit such as the remuneration received (€14,350.00), against a VAT evaded of €66,000, and the value of the assets seized from the appellant in excess of €9 million, pass. The judges reiterate, in fact, on the one hand, the legitimacy of the seizure for equivalent in relation to the entire profit generated by the offences, on the other hand, they emphasise that the objections on a possible value of the seized assets, higher than the ascertained profit, could, at most, be proposed during the execution of the seizure.