#2026-534France: Law to Fight Social and Tax Fraud
AI-generated summary for informational purposes only. Not legal advice. See the original source for the authoritative text.
This law strengthens France’s tools to detect and prevent social benefit fraud, tax fraud, and customs fraud. It allows information collected during judicial investigations by tax and customs investigators to be shared with tax and customs control teams when it can help an inspection or audit. It also lets public bodies that process or pay benefits check with the tax administration whether bank details given by a claimant match an account in that person’s name. The check returns only a yes-or-no answer, which is meant to reduce fraud while limiting the amount of banking data shared.
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Key Changes
- Allows tax and customs investigators to share useful judicial investigation material with tax and customs control teams
- Lets public benefit bodies verify whether a claimant’s bank account is in the claimant’s name
- Limits bank-account verification responses to a binary yes-or-no answer
Obligations
What this law requires
Customs and tax agents conducting judicial investigations may communicate investigation information or documents to customs or public-finance control agents only after obtaining authorization from the prosecutor who requested them or from the investigating judge, after the prosecutor’s opinion.
Information or documents shared from judicial investigations with customs or public-finance control agents must be limited to materials likely to be useful for the relevant control mission.
Judicial customs officers, judicial tax officers, and financial judicial police agents may communicate judicial-investigation information or documents to customs or public-finance control agents only with authorization from the prosecutor or, after the prosecutor’s opinion, from the investigating judge.
Public bodies responsible for processing or paying statutory or regulatory benefits may verify with the tax administration whether bank details provided by a claimant correspond to an account opened in the beneficiary’s name.