The investigative commission of the Tax Operation of the Chamber of Deputies, regarding the largest case of tax fraud in the history of the country, which meant damage to the State of nearly $240 billion, continued its work this Monday with the presentation of the national director of the Internal Revenue Service (SII), Hernán Frigolett. But, in the instance, it revealed the existence of another tax fraud, which he called the “GIFF Case.”
“The commission was established in relation to the criminal case called ‘Mega Tax Fraud’, however, the reason for this summons is to expose another case of tax crimes, which has been criminally identified as the ‘GIFF case‘”, he began saying.
The head of the SII revealed that this new aspect has to do with the creation of paper companies and massive omission of false tax documentation, a cause that is currently being processed in the North Central High Complexity Prosecutor’s Office, and is in charge of the prosecutor Ximena Chong.
The facts disclosed date back to November 2017, the result of a review carried out by the Central Regional Directorate of the SII, where the situation of two taxpayers identified as David Cartes Pulgar and Kevin Pérez Cartesboth family members, who are legal representatives of various companies that present similar irregular characteristics.
They, according to Frigolett, “had low, almost zero, taxes in the periods reviewed, they registered addresses in virtual offices, they showed signs of not having been effectively developing their economic activity.”
Based on the above, the SII carried out a search for taxpayers with similar behavior patterns, detecting 103 contributors with characteristics of being issuers of false electronic invoices and around 4,900 recipient taxpayers, which was known as the GIFF case. A month later, the same institution would have sent an email to the national address of the SII informing of the detection of the case.
After a series of steps were taken, Frigolett explained that it was decided to move forward with procedures for exercising sanctioning action, with respect to 38 taxpayers, of which ten were collected by the Department of Tax Crimes and another 28 were referred to various regional directorates.
Almost a year later, on December 24, 2018, the SII filed a complaint before the Fourth Guarantee Court of Santiago, against the recipients collected by the Department of Tax Crimes. In addition, another criminal action was filed, this time before the Seventh Guarantee Court of Santiago, against facilitators and recipients of false invoices, a case that until then includes 18 extensions of the complaint that have been presented between the years 2019 and 2023, which which leads to the fact that there are currently 55 natural persons accused as legal representatives and de facto administrators of different companies.
ex officio investigation
The representative of the Prosecutor’s Office present in the commission, the director of the unit specialized in Economic Crimes, Mauricio Fernandezinformed the court that as a result of this new case, the national prosecutor sent the information to the Western Metropolitan regional prosecutor, Marcos Pastén, who ex officio opened an “investigation into this matter.””.
He also assured that the complaint provided by the SII official in the previous session regarding these crimes, and that was sent to the Public Ministry two weeks ago along with the summons to the commission this Mondaywas “incomplete in terms of information that we have today after this session.”
“Since there is a lot of reference here to internal emails from the SII, we did not know what he had specifically reported and now, to that complaint and to that investigation that has been opened, we are going to add all the background information presented in this session, because There are antecedents that we assumed were related to omissions or apparent information that did not translate into complaints.in the context of this investigative commission, which is the Megafraud, but We just found out in this session that it does not refer to Megafraud carried out by the Western Regional Prosecutor’s Office, but refers to another investigation and others investigated with the GIFF case,” he stated.
