Standard of knowledge for the imposition of sanctions in tax audit procedures in colombia

Abstract

The Tax Statute establishes the possibility of imposing sanctions against taxpayers who fail to comply with their tax obligations. As a safeguard of due process and contradiction, the Statute develops a tax inspection procedure, which invests the Administration with a broad set of inspection and investigation mechanisms and the possibility of evidentiary practice within the procedure, which can culminate with the issuance of an administrative act that imposes economic sanctions against the delinquent taxpayer, which, although it is susceptible to ordinary remedies in governmental channels and can be sued before the contentious jurisdiction, it is no less true that it constitutes an exercise of punitive power of the State that can lead to injury to the rights and property interests of citizens, if the evidentiary assessment does not comply with the law.

In any case, the Statute did not provide for a standard of knowledge necessary for the imposition of sanctions at the end of the tax inspection procedure. This could lead one to think that, to fill the legislator’s gap, the evidentiary standard of the criminal process is applied in the tax audit procedure. After all, both procedures are manifestations of the same ius puniendi. This article proposes that the criminal standard is not applicable in the tax procedure, although in any case it postulates that an evidentiary standard of prevailing probability must be applied in the evaluation of the evidentiary material that supports the issuance of the sanctioning administrative act in matters of tax inspection.