Chain fraud

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The chain fraud is a method of criminal entrepreneurs to moonlighting to disguise and other offenses. It is widespread in the construction industry and in the building management / building cleaning sector and is essentially related to the carousel business . In the case of chain fraud, several subcontractors are connected in series. This conceals who is responsible for the personnel deployed.

Service companies

So-called service companies play a central role in chain fraud. They are registered quite regularly by operator groups, with straw people usually serving as managing directors. The actual business purpose of a service company is the commercial distribution of documents with incorrect content, such as invoices for services that have actually not been provided (so-called dummy invoices or cover invoices). There are two basic forms for customers.

1. Bill buyer

Invoice buyer model

These are entrepreneurs who register their staff for social security with wages that are too low in order to save on contributions. They pay part of the wages “black”. These black wages are simulated as payments to subcontractors. For this purpose, the entrepreneurs book the service company's invoices as an external service and transfer the money to the service company's account. There it will be withdrawn immediately and returned to the transferring party as cash. The black wages can then be paid from the cash that flows back. The operators of the service companies keep part of the cash as "commission".

2. Column slide

Model column valve

They settle their work with their clients under false names. The employees of the column pusher also work black. Column pushers also receive their money via the bank accounts of the service companies, whereby a "commission" remains with the service company.

Safety packages

Service companies easily receive clearance certificates from various authorities because they are usually newly founded and there is nothing negative against them. These certificates protect the bill buyers and clients of the column slider from official liability claims according to § 28e Abs. 3a SGB IV.

General

In 2003, the Federal Court of Auditors used the term chain fraud for the first time to describe the function and operation of criminal subcontractor chains. In his special report on tax losses in sales tax due to tax fraud and tax avoidance , he submitted proposals to the legislature. Although the damage to the sales tax was then largely curbed by the creation of § 13b UStG, the criminal subcontractor chains continued to exist.

In its 2010 situation report on organized crime in North Rhine-Westphalia, the Düsseldorf State Criminal Police Office reported on the phenomenon of straw man companies and referred to a group of Italians based in Cologne. In autumn 2013, the Cologne Public Prosecutor charged several Italian nationals who operated the two business models described above with a network of straw man companies. The Cologne Regional Court later sentenced the men to prison terms. A direct connection to the Italian mafia could not be proven.

The Hamburg tax authorities reacted in June 2013 by setting up a special unit which, together with other investigative authorities, such as customs and the State Criminal Police Office, is supposed to fight chain fraud. The organized forms of undeclared work also resulted in a change of strategy in the Federal Customs Administration towards risk-based audits.

Due to the law on the more effective and practical design of criminal proceedings of August 17, 2017 ( Federal Law Gazette 2017 I p. 3202 ), the system described above as a standard example of a particularly serious case of withholding and misappropriating wages is threatened with an increased penalty ( Section 266a Para. 4 No. 3 and 4 StGB).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Federal Audit Office: Special report of September 3, 2003
  2. ↑ Situation picture of the LKA Düsseldorf: Organized crime in NRW ( Memento of the original from May 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 640 kB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.polizei-nrw.de
  3. ↑ Spiegel-Online of October 30, 2013: Public prosecutor's office accuses alleged building afiosi
  4. ↑ Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger of December 29, 2014: "Construction Mafia evades 4.5 million euros"
  5. ↑ Publication on hamburg.de from June 3, 2013: "New special tax investigation unit against tax crime through illegal work"
  6. ↑ Customs annual balance 2015: Combating undeclared work and illegal employment
  7. ↑ Federal Ministry of Finance: Organized forms of undeclared work (PDF; 312 kB)