In Poland, a fraudulent invoice can now carry the same sentence as murder. How a nation decided that lying on a tax document was among the gravest of crimes.
In March of 2017, Poland joined a small and unenviable club of nations that treat invoice fraud with the severity traditionally reserved for the most heinous offenses. Issue a fictitious invoice exceeding five million złoty—roughly 1.2 million dollars—and you face up to twenty years in prison. Lead an organized ring, or operate at sufficient scale, and the ceiling rises to twenty-five years. The same sentence, it bears noting, that Polish courts may impose for murder.
This is not rhetorical exaggeration. This is the law.
The contemporary Polish entrepreneur must now navigate two parallel legal regimes governing false invoices—systems that operate simultaneously and, according to the prevailing doctrine of the Supreme Court, may both apply to a single act. The first lives in the Fiscal Penal Code, Article 62, which addresses unreliable invoices within the traditional framework of tax offenses. Penalties here scale with the tax amount at stake: fines measured in daily rates, or imprisonment of not less than one year for larger sums. These remain, technically speaking, fiscal crimes—processed through fiscal criminal procedure, adjudicated with an eye toward revenue protection.
The second regime, introduced in 2017, inhabits the regular Criminal Code. Articles 270a and 271a created what Polish legal scholars have taken to calling “invoice felonies”—ordinary crimes, not fiscal ones, with penalties that escalate dramatically based on the gross value shown on the document. Exceed two hundred thousand złoty, and you’re looking at six months to eight years. Cross the five-million threshold, or make invoice fraud your steady source of income, and the range becomes three to twenty years. The most aggravated cases—those involving organized groups or large-scale operations—reach that remarkable twenty-five-year maximum.
The distinction between these regimes extends well beyond the quantum of punishment. The Criminal Code provisions target invoices as documents, irrespective of whether they were ever actually used to defraud the treasury. The mere act of creating or deploying a false invoice of sufficient magnitude completes the offense. No tax need be evaded; no refund need be claimed. The document itself is the crime.
Where, exactly, does the line fall between these two worlds? Primarily along the axis of value—though the critical measurement differs between regimes. The Fiscal Penal Code cares about the tax amount reflected on the invoice. The Criminal Code concerns itself with the total receivable—the gross figure, VAT included.
Invoices whose gross value remains below the “significant” threshold of two hundred thousand złoty stay within fiscal territory. Article 62 of the Fiscal Penal Code remains the governing provision for garden-variety unreliable invoices, the kind that emerge from sloppy bookkeeping or opportunistic corner-cutting rather than systematic fraud.
Cross into significant-value territory, and the Criminal Code engages with its full severity. Crucially, values may be aggregated: if a perpetrator acted in conditions of a “continuous offense”—in brief intervals, executing a preconceived plan—individual invoice amounts are summed. A dozen modestly fraudulent documents can, together, constitute a single felony.
In practice, both regimes may apply simultaneously. A 2013 Supreme Court resolution, decided by an enlarged seven-judge panel, held that the rules for eliminating multiple legal qualifications do not apply when fiscal and ordinary criminal offenses coincide in a single act. Someone who issues unreliable invoices and subsequently uses them to extract VAT refunds may therefore face prosecution under both the Criminal Code (for the documentary falsification itself) and the Fiscal Penal Code (for the tax diminution). This position, while dominant in judicial practice, remains contested in academic commentary—a doctrinal fault line that continues to generate scholarly friction.
The Criminal Code draws a further distinction that shapes how these cases are charged and tried.
Article 270a addresses material falsification: the physical forgery or alteration of an invoice, the counterfeiter’s craft applied to commercial documents. Anyone can commit this offense—it requires no special status or authorization. Importantly, however, the person who issues an invoice and fills it with lies does not fall under this provision. Their conduct belongs to a different category.
Article 271a covers intellectual falsification: an invoice authentic in form but mendacious in content. The document looks proper, bears genuine signatures, follows all formatting requirements—yet it records a transaction that never occurred, or describes a real transaction in terms that diverge from reality. This, too, is a general offense; the legislature deliberately employed the broad concept of “issuing” rather than the narrower “certifying” that characterizes other documentary crimes. The choice was intentional, closing what had been an awkward gap in criminal coverage.
In the ordinary course of commercial fraud, intellectual falsification predominates. The schemer doesn’t counterfeit someone else’s invoices; he issues his own, documenting phantom transactions or inflating genuine ones.
For years, Polish courts struggled with a conceptual puzzle: could an invoice documenting a transaction that never happened—the so-called “empty invoice”—fall within fiscal criminal law at all? The argument ran thus: if there was no underlying service or delivery, then there was no invoice “for the performance of a service,” and therefore no offense under provisions that seemed to presuppose an actual economic event.
The 2017 reforms eliminated this interpretive wrinkle with surgical precision. The Fiscal Penal Code shed its troublesome phrasing. The Criminal Code explicitly criminalized invoices false “as to factual circumstances that may affect the determination of public-law receivables”—with no requirement whatsoever that the invoice document any real transaction.
An empty invoice is now, unambiguously, a crime. At sufficient scale, it is a felony of the first order.
One exception survives. If an empty invoice was created solely to deceive another private party—to induce them to part with money or property, outside any tax context—the conduct may constitute documentary fraud under Article 271, Section 1 of the Criminal Code, but fall outside fiscal criminal law entirely. The distinction matters: different courts, different procedures, different prosecutorial priorities.
The law reaches not only those who create false invoices but also those who use them. Both regimes—fiscal and ordinary criminal—penalize the deployment of unreliable documents.
The practical implications are stark. An entrepreneur who accepts an invoice and uses it to claim VAT deductions or classify expenses as costs bears the same liability as the issuer—provided he knew the document was false, or at minimum accepted that possibility. Under Article 271a of the Criminal Code, liability attaches to anyone who “uses” such an invoice. There is no need to demonstrate actual tax diminution. The mere act of deploying a document whose falsity the user knew or accepted suffices for conviction.
Both direct and conditional intent support liability here. The bookkeeper who processes invoices for purported sales of significant value, who never sees the goods, whose employer lacks transport, logistics, warehouses, or a meaningful client base—such a person, issuing invoices while aware that the documented transactions quite probably never occurred, may be found to have accepted the falsification. Conditional intent, in Polish criminal doctrine, requires proof of both intellectual and volitional elements: the perpetrator must have recognized the high probability of the relevant circumstance and reconciled himself to it.
Yet objective negligence—the failure to exercise due care—does not, standing alone, constitute intent. This distinction is critical. The argument “I received an invoice from my counterparty; how was I to know?” retains force up to a point. An invoice for intangible services from a company with no operating history, for an amount bearing no relation to any conceivable real value—such a document should provoke questions. Ignoring them may be treated as acceptance of irregularity. But the entrepreneur who genuinely, if carelessly, failed to notice warning signs has not committed a crime requiring intentional conduct.
Not every error on an invoice constitutes an offense. Polish law distinguishes carefully between two categories.
A defective invoice contains formal errors: incorrect numbering, a missing required element, an erroneous VAT rate applied to a real transaction. The document is technically flawed but may accurately reflect an actual economic event. This is a fiscal misdemeanor, perhaps a minor fiscal offense—nothing that puts anyone in prison for decades.
An unreliable invoice lies about substance. It documents a transaction that never occurred, inflates values, identifies fictitious counterparties. Here the serious consequences begin.
An incorrect VAT rate on a genuine transaction is a defect. An inflated value on a genuine transaction is unreliability. The boundary may seem fine, but it separates administrative inconvenience from potential felony.
Importantly, false information concerning non-obligatory invoice elements—or elements without significance for determining public-law receivables—falls outside Criminal Code coverage. Errors in a party’s address, graphic marks, visual formatting, or product names (unless the name itself affects the applicable tax rate) do not constitute invoice felonies. The criminal law concerns itself with lies that matter for revenue, not with every species of documentary imprecision.
A separate category of fiscal offense involves cash registers. Sales made without register documentation, or failure to issue a receipt, constitute fiscal crimes under Article 62, Section 4—though in practice they’re typically charged as misdemeanors.
The statute speaks of “not issuing” a receipt, not “refusing to issue” one. The seller must print the receipt and make it available to the customer—place it at the buyer’s disposal. If the customer walks away without waiting for the printout, or visibly indicates disinterest in the document, no violation occurs. But if the seller deliberately fails to print the receipt, or conceals it before making it available, the offense is complete.
Separately, it is a fiscal crime to fail to preserve invoices for the required period—generally until the limitation period for the underlying tax obligation expires. Premature destruction of documentation constitutes a violation independent of whether the underlying transactions were proper. The provision protects the possibility of official verification; it cares about the paper trail, not the substance of what the papers record.
The legislature recognized that not every invoice offense deserves the law’s maximum severity. Both material and intellectual falsification provisions include a “lesser gravity” type—a privileged variant applicable to cases that, viewed in their totality, warrant lighter treatment. For lesser-gravity material falsification, the range is a fine, restriction of liberty, or imprisonment to two years. For intellectual falsification, imprisonment to three years.
Notably, the lesser-gravity provisions apply not only to the basic offenses but also to their aggravated variants. Even an invoice fraud technically qualifying for the three-to-twenty-year range may be treated as a lesser-gravity case if circumstances warrant. When assessing gravity, courts may draw guidance from the Fiscal Penal Code’s directive to consider the nature and scope of the offense’s negative consequences, the perpetrator’s personal characteristics and circumstances, and post-offense conduct.
What does all this mean for the Polish entrepreneur?
The 2017 reforms fundamentally transformed the risk landscape. Practices that once produced, at worst, fiscal difficulties may now lead to years of imprisonment.
Scale matters. A single unreliable invoice for a modest amount remains a matter for the tax office. A series of invoices crossing the significant-value threshold becomes, potentially, a matter for prosecutors and criminal courts—with sentencing exposure measured in decades.
Role matters. The law provides for extraordinary mitigation of punishment for perpetrators who reveal the circumstances of the offense and identify other participants. This is an invitation to cooperate with authorities—and a warning that confederates may prove less loyal than anticipated.
Ignorance has limits. The defense of not knowing works only so far. But it works further than prosecutors sometimes suggest. Objective carelessness is not criminal intent; the mere failure to exercise due diligence does not satisfy the mental element of an intentional offense. The entrepreneur who genuinely didn’t know, even if he should have, stands in a different position from the one who knew or accepted the probability of falsity.
When the audit begins, professional assistance from day one. The line between a tax matter and a criminal matter has never been thinner. What begins as routine verification of deductions may transform into an investigation carrying the prospect of years behind bars.
Skarbiec Law Firm handles criminal and fiscal criminal matters involving invoices—from minor misdemeanors to the most serious charges connected with VAT carousels. We also assist preventively: an audit of invoicing procedures can identify and eliminate risk before it materializes in the form of an indictment.
Legal status: December 2025
