Tax and criminal proceedings running in parallel: what to do in the first ten days is the question a board faces once Skatteverket refers a case to the prosecutor. The two tracks are legally separate and do not pause for each other. What is said, to whom, and in what order in the opening days shapes both files.
Who this concerns
This scenario reaches boards, CFOs and controllers of companies operating in Sweden, most often when an ongoing Skatteverket audit escalates into a formal criminal referral, or when a criminal investigation into a suspected tax offence (skattebrott) opens before the civil reassessment is final. It is one of the recurring configurations inside our tax disputes practice, and it shows up with particular frequency in groups with cross-border structures, because intercompany pricing, VAT chains and withholding arrangements are the areas most likely to draw both a reassessment and a prosecutor's interest at the same time.
Foreign parent companies and foreign directors face a version of the same problem with an added layer. Swedish criminal procedure applies to individuals present in Sweden or connected to a Swedish legal entity, while the civil tax claim attaches to the entity itself. A group finance function based abroad, unfamiliar with how the prosecutor's office (Ekobrottsmyndigheten, the Swedish Economic Crime Authority) coordinates with Skatteverket, tends to discover the parallel track later than a domestic company would. Later discovery narrows what can still be done in the opening period.
What the law says
Under Swedish law as it currently stands, the civil tax assessment and the criminal case run as two separate proceedings with two separate decision-makers. Skatteverket examines the return, the bookkeeping and the underlying transactions and issues a reassessment (omprövningsbeslut), together, where relevant, with a tax penalty (skattetillägg). The prosecutor examines the same facts against the threshold for a criminal offence and decides independently whether to bring charges. Neither authority is bound by the other's conclusion, and a reassessment can stand even where a prosecution fails, or the reverse.
The interaction that matters in practice is procedural rather than substantive. Statements made to Skatteverket during a civil audit are not automatically shielded from later use in a criminal case, and material produced under the civil duty to cooperate can end up in the criminal file. The right to remain silent in a formal criminal interview does not extend backwards to correspondence and disclosures already made in the tax proceeding. This single fact is what most changes how the first ten days should be handled.
How it works in practice
The first ten days, in order
The sequence that protects the company's position is not about drafting a defence. It is about closing the gaps a later reviewer, whether at Skatteverket, the prosecutor's office or a court, will look for first.
Three things need to happen in order: preserve the underlying records exactly as they stand, decide who inside the company is authorised to speak to either authority, and separate the civil response from the criminal response so they are handled by people who do not report to each other on this specific matter. Doing these out of order, or skipping the separation altogether, is the most common source of avoidable damage.
Who inside the company should speak, and who should not
The employee who prepared the return, the controller who signed off the VAT filing and the director who approved the structure are, once a criminal referral exists, potential witnesses or potential suspects rather than company representatives who can speak informally to either authority. A statement made by any of them to Skatteverket in the belief that it only affects the civil assessment can surface later in the criminal file. The practical rule is that nobody who was operationally involved in the transaction under review makes an unscripted statement to either authority during this period.
What happens to documents already in Skatteverket's file
Material already disclosed to Skatteverket under the civil duty to cooperate does not disappear from view once a criminal referral is made. Requesting its return, or arguing after the fact that it was disclosed only for civil purposes, does not generally succeed. The working assumption should be that anything already in the civil file is available to the criminal investigation, so the first ten days should go into what is said next, not into trying to undo what has already been said.
Coordinating the civil response with criminal counsel
The civil reassessment deadline does not stop running because a criminal investigation has opened, and missing it narrows the company's options in both tracks at once. At the same time, a submission drafted purely to satisfy the civil deadline, without input from whoever handles the criminal exposure, can create statements that are difficult to reconcile later. The two workstreams need a single point of coordination even when they are run by different people.
The foreign element: cross-border evidence and dual jurisdiction exposure
Where the counterparty, the parent company or the disputed transaction sits outside Sweden, the first ten days carry an additional task: establishing which records are held abroad, in which entity, and under which country's disclosure rules they can be produced to a Swedish authority. A Swedish prosecutor can seek assistance from a foreign authority to obtain records held outside Sweden, and a foreign parent's own compliance or internal audit function may hold material that is discoverable in Sweden even though it was never intended for a Swedish audience. Groups that treat the Swedish subsidiary's tax file as a purely local matter tend to find this out only after the request has already been made. A UK parent asking what a resulting Swedish decision could mean for it directly should also read recognising a Swedish judgment in the UK, since enforcement abroad is a separate question from the Swedish proceedings themselves.
What to check before responding to either authority
- Which entity and which individuals have actually received a request, and from which authority
- Whether any statement already made to Skatteverket could be read as an admission relevant to intent
- Where the underlying source documents are held, and whether any of them sit outside Sweden
- Whether the same individual is expected to represent the company on both tracks
- Whether the civil deadline and any criminal interview date fall inside the same window
- Which advisers are covered by legal privilege in this matter and which are not
- Whether the disputed transaction involves intercompany pricing with its own documentation exposure, addressed separately in transfer pricing documentation for foreign-owned groups
Does Skatteverket have to finish before the prosecutor can act?
No. The two tracks are independent, and a criminal referral is commonly made while the civil reassessment is still open. Waiting for the civil case to conclude before addressing the criminal exposure is not a workable strategy, since disclosures made during that wait become part of both files regardless of which one concludes first.
Can I be compelled to answer questions in a Skatteverket audit while a criminal investigation is open?
The civil duty to provide information to Skatteverket continues to apply, but material produced under that duty can be used in the criminal case, and a formal criminal interview carries a right to silence that the civil process does not. The two obligations need separate handling and separate advice rather than a single answer treated as if it served both.
Does paying the disputed tax stop the criminal case?
Payment can affect sentencing considerations and, in narrower voluntary-disclosure situations, whether a prosecution is brought at all, but it does not by itself close an investigation once a formal referral has been made. Whether payment changes the outcome depends on timing and on whether the disclosure was voluntary rather than reactive to an audit already underway.
The numbers
No deadline in this file can be quoted without the specific reassessment or referral that sets it, since the periods for a civil reassessment and for prosecution vary with the tax year and the type of adjustment involved. What can be said generally, under Swedish law as it currently stands, is that the civil reassessment period and the criminal limitation period do not run on the same clock, and a company should treat both as active until each is formally closed rather than assuming the shorter of the two protects it. Where a fixed figure matters commercially, for example how far back a return can be reopened, it should be confirmed against the specific tax year and the assessment already issued rather than assumed from a general rule of thumb.
The same caution applies to cost. What a parallel matter costs depends on how many individuals need separate representation, how much of the underlying evidence sits abroad, and how early the two tracks were separated. A matter handled from day one with a single coordinated view typically involves fewer duplicated work streams than one where the civil and criminal sides were run independently for months before anyone connected them.
Where it usually goes wrong
The most frequent failure is treating the civil audit as the whole problem and reacting to the criminal side only once a formal interview is scheduled. By then, the record that will be judged against the criminal threshold has already been created, largely by people who did not know that was what they were doing.
A second failure is appointing the same person, often the CFO or the general counsel who negotiated the original structure, to represent the company on both tracks. This looks efficient on paper, but it puts one person in the position of defending decisions they made personally, which weakens the company's position in both files at once. A director weighing whether to step down once a criminal referral becomes known should read how resigning from the board affects personal liability before treating resignation as a way out, since timing changes the answer considerably.
A third failure, specific to foreign-owned structures, is assuming that a parent company's internal investigation, run under its own home jurisdiction's privilege rules, is protected in Sweden. It generally is not, and material generated for an internal review abroad has, in comparable matters, ended up disclosed in the Swedish criminal file precisely because nobody checked whether Swedish privilege rules covered it.
A fourth failure appears where the reassessment is large enough to threaten solvency and the response is to move assets out of the company rather than engage with the audit. That path carries its own exposure, separate from the tax matter, covered in moving assets before a bankruptcy filing, and it tends to convert a tax problem into a harder one.
None of this reverses once the first submissions have gone in. The window in which these mistakes are still avoidable is the one described here as the first ten days, and it does not reopen.
What to do next
What can be resolved through internal file review and what requires an external read of the exposure before the next submission goes in are different questions, and confusing them is how the mistakes above happen. If a criminal referral has already been made, or is realistically expected within the current audit cycle, an assessment of the civil and criminal exposure run together, rather than as two separate reviews, is worth commissioning before the next deadline rather than after it. Request an assessment of the parallel exposure if that is where the matter currently stands.
Where the underlying issue traces back to a group reorganisation rather than a straightforward reassessment, how that reorganisation was treated for tax purposes is often where the civil position, and by extension the criminal exposure, was actually decided, and it is worth reviewing on its own terms.