THE PRINCIPLE OF JURISDICTIONAL AUTONOMY OF A COURT ADJUDICATING IN A CRIMINAL FISCAL CASE IN THE JUDICIAL PRACTICE OF ORDINARY AND ADMINISTRATIVE COURTS

Abstract

In cases of fiscal offences and fiscal transgressions, an element of evidence in a case is often a tax decision issued in tax proceedings conducted against a person who acts as a defendant in a penal fiscal proceedings. As a result, a question arises as to the evidentiary value of such a decision, which was issued for the purposes of tax proceedings and not criminal fiscal proceedings. In particular, an important question is whether the criminal fiscal court is bound by the findings included in such a decision? An additional problem for the issue addressed is the question, whether between tax and penal fiscal proceedings there is any kind of preliminary relationship, which makes the examination of a penal fiscal case dependent on the prior tax decision issued by a relevant tax administration authority. The analysis of the jurisdiction of common and administrative courts does not allow for an excplicit answer in this respect, which led the authors to take up the presented issue and to formulate de lege lata conclusions, related also to the need to unify the jurisdprudence. The paper also discusses the principle of free assessment of evidence in the context of characterising a tax decision (of both, constitutive and declaratory nature) as one of the possible evidences that a fiscal court has to deal with.

Keywords

• criminal fiscal responsibility
• independent jurisdiction of the court
• tax decision
• free assessment of evidence
• preliminary situation