Officials from the Savona Customs Office have identified a trader company based in Turin which, over the course of a very short period of time, extracted large quantities of diesel from a tax warehouse in Savona without paying the excise duty due.
This movement did not escape the notice of the customs officials, who immediately ordered the owner of the tax warehouse, where the residual part of the product is still stored today, not to allow further extractions of the same and started the procedures for the recovery of the evaded tax, which was subsequently paid directly by the owner of the tax warehouse, who paid the Treasury more than one million euros in excise duty as well as administrative penalties of 300 thousand euros: resources already confiscated by the Savona Customs Office and available of the state.
This is a silent activity in which customs officers monitor the position of traders operating in the provincial area or, of those commercial operators who, not having their own tax warehousing structure, make use of facilities (authorised for tax warehousing) owned by third parties, who are primarily responsible for the payment of taxes due.
Carrying out this type of checks requires considerable analytical capacity and attention, allowing the achievement of a high level of tax protection by identifying tax evaders with “surgical” precision.
One of the main sectors in which this control action is made explicit is that of excise duties which, at provincial level, determine a total tax revenue of approximately €350 million. for energy products intended for fueling only (consisting mainly of diesel and petrol).
The activity of the local customs officers demonstrates, once again, not only the high level of professionalism achieved by them but also the effectiveness and completeness of the databases at their disposal, the consultation and interpolation of which is, in the current economic context, of ever greater importance in order to identify tax evaders.
