They are sitting on a huge data-pile: 3.2 terabytes with 49 million documents, e-mails, forms, spreadsheets, identity cards. If you print all this out on paper and lay the sheets in a row, a distance of more than 10,000 kilometers would come together, calculates the Hessian tax inspector Armin Wolf. And that, Wolf says, is even more than the distance from Germany to Panama.
Wolf is the head of the "investigation team Olet", a team of eight investigators of the tax office Kassel II, which evaluate together with about 20 people of the Federal Criminal Police Office, the "Panama Papers". Among other things, it contains information on more than 270,000 offshore companies and their owners from all over the world.
Many of these people have obviously tried to hide at least part of their wealth and income from the tax authorities of their home countries. Wolf and his colleagues have been working since August 2017 to ensure that the tax authorities can get hold of all this information - in order to collect the taxes retrospectively.
Kassel tax inspectors evaluate data
That's not easy. Because the files, says Wolf, are mainly written in English and Spanish, and also largely "unsorted and unstructured". They come from the computers of the Panamanian law firm Mossack & Fonseca, which offered their international customer base a clandestine complete package for decades: founding and managing fictitious companies in tax havens, where at most an extremely low tax rate on profits must - and in which the identity the owner remains secret from the authorities.
The offerings included, for example, a "virtual office service" or a "nominee director", ie the promise of a "complete separation" of the assets in the offshore company from the identity of its owner.
In 2016, the information, apparently copied by an insider, first landed on an international media network, to which the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" belongs in Germany. Barely a year later, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) bought an updated version of the files, allegedly for a seven-figure amount. The state of Hesse contributed 316,000 euros to this purchase. And also the competence and workforce of his tax inspectors in Kassel, who now see themselves as "service providers" for tax offices in Germany and abroad and centrally evaluate the data with the aid of an IT system.
About 150 tax criminal cases initiated
For the Hessian Minister of Finance Thomas Schäfer a worthwhile business. Up until now, according to Schäfer, about 290,000 documents on about 1,500 offshore companies were processed and put together in such a way that they could be passed on to all tax offices with all necessary information about owners and asset development. As a result, tax criminal proceedings have been initiated in about 150 cases or already existing proceedings have been fed with additional information, says Schäfer.
Overall, the tax authorities had so far achieved nationwide about 4.2 million euros in "additional revenue", says Schäfer. This is much less than the sum of 150 million euros, which was called by several media a few weeks ago as a "retrieved money" for Germany. Whether this magnitude can be achieved was left open by Schäfer. However, many procedures have not yet been completed and the huge data set has not been fully evaluated.
In any case, Schäfer relies above all on a "general preventive approach" to the action: anyone who has always thought of hiding his money or his black money profits in offshore companies from the authorities knows at least since the leak of the Panama papers that this with a considerable risk of discovery is connected: "Tax crime is not to be tolerated and will be decisively fought," said Schäfer.
Notes on drug and arms trafficking
Moreover, the papers had also led to a significant bycatch: The officials had met in the documents of the offshore companies on business, which justify beyond the tax fraud intensive investigations of the Federal Criminal Police Office. Notes on drug and arms trafficking, for example.
Tax investigator Wolf expects to be busy at least until the end of the year with the evaluation of the "Panama Papers". The know-how gained by the Kassel-based "Olet" group will also help in the evaluation of further leaked files from tax havens that have since been received by the authorities under names such as "Malta Leaks", "Bahamas Leaks" or "Cyprus-leaks".