‘It’s not that simple, you say? That could very well be true, but we are not blind. We can see what kind of cars your top people drive. We can see the luxury enshrined within your offices.’ Jan Tuerlinckx, partner at Tuerlinckx Tax Lawyers, addresses the State of Belgium in a letter.

Dear Mr CFO of Belgium Ltd, we take note of the findings of the Belgian Audit Office, which recently published its 176th Yearbook. In it, your annual accounts are described as ‘below par’. We have therefore taken the liberty to audit your accounts ourselves. Our findings can only be described as astonishing.

You claim that you are operating in a competitive environment, that you are besieged by unfair competition from other states and that your company delivers important services to large numbers of people. Maybe so, but that is no excuse for keeping inadequate records. You know your accounts have to be in order. As to the errors themselves, they are no small matter. You have failed to record EUR 6 billion in VAT revenue. You leave claims to the value of EUR 11 billion off the balance sheet, on the pretext that they are uncollectible. I’m afraid we don’t buy that. People who receive an invoice have to pay up. It's as simple as that.

It’s not that simple, you say? That could very well be true, but we are not blind. We can see what kind of cars your top people drive. We can see the luxury enshrined within your offices. We know about their private chauffeurs. You say that they need to drive a lot, including in the very early and very late hours and that a private chauffeur is therefore a necessity. Completely irrelevant. Do you think we have a private chauffeur to go to the Ministry of Finance?

You say the rules are too technical and too complex. The same claim could be made by any company and any private citizen and yet they manage it. Everyone is expected to know the law. Just read the official Belgian Gazette on a regular basis and you will find terabytes of information. It may not all be equally comprehensible, but it is the law. You also receive plenty of advice from the Audit Office, to which, unfortunately, you pay no attention at all. So please don’t tell us that you just didn't know. This phenomenon has a name. It is called fraud.

We also note that your group holds a subsidiary in the British Virgin Islands. That doesn’t look very good. We let you get away with that at the time, although we can’t now remember why. In any case, we won’t let that slip through the net this time.

We therefore reject your accounts and declare them to have no evidential value. We would like to refer you to your neighbouring company, Netherlands Ltd. They manage to book a cool EUR 10 billion in profits, whereas you built up losses to more than 100 percent of your turnover. We seriously suspect that you have pocketed the VAT revenue yourself. That means a tax assessment of 103% because of secret commissions. Also, failing to include revenue in the accounts amounts to fraud and this is in addition to the story with the tax haven. We will impose a tax increase of 200%.

And that is not all. As we are now talking about fraud, we will check your accounts of the past seven years and we will charge interest on all the tax evaded, partly at 7% per year and partly at 4% per year. The latter rate is an absolute steal.

And may I give you some advice? Don't engage a tax lawyer and don’t even think about instructing them to claim that we have made a procedural error. That would really make us mad and believe me, you don’t want that to happen. In any case, we don’t need to keep to the legal procedures, as the judge will declare that even illegitimately acquired proof is still proof. (Just type ‘Antigoon-doctrine’ into Google.)

And by the way, you should tell your managers that we will take another look at their personal tax records of the past seven years. After all, they pocketed the VAT revenues that were kept off the balance sheet themselves. That will be taxed at 50%. As a favour, we will keep the penalty to just 100% plus interest. And that is letting them off lightly. After all, if Belgium Ltd goes bankrupt, it will be as a result of their fraud and we will hold them personally liable for the tax debts of the bankrupt company.

Yours sincerely,

Your tax official