The tax reform bills of recent years have adopted the standard of other jurisdictions regarding the criminalization of certain conducts related to tax obligations.

The amplification of the scope of withholding agent’s omission crime (2016) and the creation of the relatively broad criminal category ‘tax fraud’ (2018) show that the intention of the Colombian state is to discourage tax evasion and non-compliance with tax obligations through criminal prosecution.

In this vein, the last two tax reforms (Law 1943 of 2018 and Law 2010 of 2019) created a group of the Attorney General’s office specialized in the detection, investigation and prosecution of tax crimes, called the Special Directorate Against Tax Crimes, under the Attorney General’s Delegate of Criminal Finance.

Based on this legal provision, the Attorney General issued Resolution 720 of 2021 in which criteria are established for the prosecution of tax crimes, according to the jurisdiction of the Specialized Directorate Against Tax Crimes.

Thus, the criminal penalization of conducts related to tax matters is increasingly close, so that taxpayers must act with the utmost diligence in determining and fulfilling their tax obligations.