Compliance & Investigation

The Compliance & Investigations Directorate is a semi-autonomous specialised unit within the Ministry for Finance specifically aimed at addressing tax evasion and tax fraud. The roles and functions of the Compliance & Investigations Directorate complement and support the investigative and enforcement capacities of the Office of the Commissioner for Revenue. The Compliance & Investigations Directorate exercises its powers mainly through the actual conduct of detailed tax audits and also through exhaustive sectoral and/or specific information collated from various sources and residing within the Unit’s Data Warehouse. In fact, the Compliance & Investigations Directorate's mission statement is as follows:

"To collect and analyse information and conduct tax audits that will ensure all members of the community pay their fair share of tax."

Functions

The Tax Compliance Unit's principal functions are the following:

To complement and support the investigative functions of the Office of the Commissioner for Revenue including all direct and indirect taxes, customs and when applicable social security.
To collect information on individual taxpayers and business sectors from the widest possible sources and to process this information into structured and integrated data on taxpayer/business entities. This integrated data enables the compilation of business profiles and risk analysis both at an individual level as well as on a sectoral basis.
To conduct research into the earning patterns of various economic operators within business sectors in order to establish industry benchmarks.
The Tax Compliance Unit does not have a tax collection function. Hence, the issuing of tax assessments (following an audit) and the collection of tax and penalties/interest thereon remains the function of the Office of the Commissioner for Revenue on whose behalf the tax audit is carried out.

Opening Hours

Winter: 8.00a.m. to 12.00p.m. and 1.30pm to 4.00p.m.
Summer: 8.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.