CH194120 - Electronic sales suppression: introduction: what is electronic sales suppression

Electronic sales suppression is where a business deliberately manipulates its electronic sales records in order to hide or reduce the value of individual transactions. This is undertaken to reduce the recorded turnover of the business and the corresponding tax liabilities, while providing what appears to be a credible and compliant audit trail.

Manipulation occurs either at, or after, the point of sale and broadly takes one of two forms

• businesses can exploit software and technology that have been created specifically for the purposes of tax evasion (for instance, software that deliberately excludes certain products or types of transactions from tax audit trail reports),
• businesses can deliberately misuse electronic point of sales systems to suppress sales, (for instance, by using a training mode in a till to exclude genuine keyed-in sales)