A woman signed a voluntary disclosure form, together with her husband, relating to foreign assets worth over two million euros. Years later, she claimed that her husband had kept her in the dark about those assets until the end of 2017. She therefore claimed she had no intention of making false tax returns. The court considers this statement to be completely implausible. After all, the voluntary disclosure form refers to 'we' and 'us' and was signed by her herself.<\/p>\n
The woman runs a business with her husband as a general partnership. Her husband used to work for the tax authorities. The couple hold a securities account in Luxembourg with a balance of around two million euros. In 2013, they closed the account and transferred the balance to Hong Kong. The new account was opened in their son\u2019s name, as he has to be in Hong Kong regularly for work. On 29 December 2017, the woman, her husband and their son jointly submitted a voluntary disclosure to the tax authorities. In the email, they state that they wish to make a voluntary disclosure 'regarding the failure to declare assets that should have been taxed under Box 3'. All three sign the declaration personally.<\/p>\n
The inspector has issued additional income tax assessments for the years 2009 to 2014 inclusive. At the couple\u2019s request, these are imposed on the wife alone. The assessments for the years 2012 to 2014 include administrative fines of 120% for wilful misconduct. These fines have already been reduced due to the voluntary disclosure. Had there been no voluntary disclosure, a fine of 300% could have been imposed. The wife has lodged an objection. She argues that she was unaware of the foreign assets and that her husband deliberately kept her in the dark. She therefore claims she did not act with intent.<\/p>\n
The court dismissed this defence out of hand. The voluntary disclosure form shows that the woman was aware of the Luxembourg account in 2013 at the very least, as she closed that account together with her husband at that time. The tax returns for 2012, 2013 and 2014 were all submitted after that closure. The woman was therefore aware of the assets but failed to declare them. The voluntary disclosure consistently refers to 'we' and 'us' and was co-signed by her. The court considers the husband\u2019s contradictory statement \u2013 that she was only informed at the end of 2017 \u2013 to be entirely implausible.<\/p>\n
A woman, together with her husband, signs a voluntary disclosure form for foreign assets amounting to just over<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4600,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vwg.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vwg.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vwg.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vwg.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vwg.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vwg.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vwg.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vwg.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vwg.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vwg.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}