A tax proceeding in Poland is not a duel of arguments. It is a war of position—terrain, time, and resources. You can be right and lose because you didn’t know how to defend your rightness. You can hold a weak position and win because you knew where the opponent’s weaknesses lay.
Every proceeding has its economics: the costs you bear and the costs the other side bears. The authority has the advantage of resources—time, personnel, budget, institutional patience. You have a business to run, obligations to meet, employees to pay, nerves to fray. But this asymmetry is not absolute. The authority has constraints too. Other cases demanding attention. Superiors watching the statistics. Deadlines that must be observed.
Strategy in a tax proceeding is not just legal argumentation. It is resource management—yours and your opponent’s. Knowing when to accelerate and when to slow down. When to escalate and when to de-escalate. When to fight and when to negotiate.
Not every war needs to be won. Some need only be ended.
The Logic of Escalation in Polish Tax Proceedings
The Polish tax system has a built-in logic of escalation. It begins innocuously—an audit, questions, explanations. Then come findings. From findings, a decision. From a decision, a liability. From liability, enforcement. And running parallel, in the shadows, something worse: criminal fiscal proceedings (postępowanie karne skarbowe).
Each stage opens the door to the next. And each stage closes certain avenues of defense.
This is a game in which the taxpayer’s position deteriorates over time. The later you begin to act, the fewer options you have. The more you say at the beginning, the less freedom you retain at the end. The longer you wait for the matter to “resolve itself,” the deeper you sink into a structure from which exit grows difficult.
The best intervention in any tax proceeding in Poland is early intervention. But to intervene early, you must recognize that something has begun—before it takes the form of an official letter advising you of your right to defense.
The Illusion of Cooperation
Polish tax authorities often communicate an expectation of cooperation. They suggest that openness will be rewarded, that explanations will help, that “the matter can be resolved” if only the taxpayer demonstrates good faith.
This is not a lie. But neither is it the whole truth.
Cooperating with an authority that is conducting tax proceedings against you is like negotiating with someone holding your wallet. You can be polite. You can be businesslike. But you should not confuse politeness with submission, nor directness with naïveté.
Everything you say can be used. Everything you write will be incorporated into the file. Everything you sign will bind you for years.
Strategic cooperation is not the same as unconditional cooperation. The first protects your interests. The second surrenders them.
Security Measures: When the State Takes Before It Proves
There is a particular type of tax proceeding in Poland that entrepreneurs rarely hear about until it touches them: the proceeding for a security decision (decyzja zabezpieczająca).
A tax authority may—before issuing a decision determining liability—secure the anticipated debt against the taxpayer’s assets. It may seize accounts, freeze assets, paralyze the company’s operations. All that is required is “justified concern” that the obligation will not be fulfilled.
This is preventive logic taken to its extreme: the state takes before it has proved it has the right to take.
Security decisions are sometimes deployed as instruments of pressure. An entrepreneur whose accounts have been frozen is an entrepreneur inclined toward concession. A company that cannot pay its employees and suppliers is a company ready to sign anything to regain liquidity.
That is why an appeal against a security decision is not a formality. It is often the first line of defense—and often the most important.
Transfer of Liability: When a Debt Is Not Yours but Becomes Yours
Polish tax law knows a mechanism that breaks the basic intuition about responsibility: the transfer of liability to a third party (odpowiedzialność osób trzecich).
Were you a board member of a company with arrears? You are liable. Did you purchase an enterprise that had unpaid taxes? You are liable. Were you a partner in a civil partnership? You are liable.
This is not liability for your actions. It is liability for your position. For having been in a particular place, at a particular time, in a particular role.
A tax proceeding for transfer of liability is a proceeding in which you defend yourself against someone else’s debt. This requires a different strategy than defending against your own obligation—and a different psychology. Because you must prove not that the debt doesn’t exist, but that it should not have fallen on you.
Undisclosed Sources: The Reversed Burden of Proof
There is one type of tax proceeding in Poland in which the rules of the game are inverted: the proceeding concerning undisclosed sources of income (nieujawnione źródła przychodów).
Normally, it is the authority that must prove you have a liability. In an undisclosed-sources case, it is you who must prove where you obtained the funds for the expenditures you made.
Did you spend more than you reported? The tax office asks: where did it come from? And if you cannot answer, you answer in another way—with a seventy-five percent tax on the difference.
This is one of the most invasive mechanisms in Polish tax law. And one of the most dangerous—because it attacks where most people are unprepared. Who keeps documentation of every gift from family, every savings account from twenty years ago, every cash transaction?
In this proceeding, memory is your enemy and the absence of documentation is the verdict.
Navigating Tax Proceedings in Poland
Polish tax law is an archipelago: tax audits (kontrola podatkowa), customs and fiscal audits (kontrola celno-skarbowa), tax proceedings (postępowanie podatkowe), criminal fiscal proceedings, enforcement proceedings, security proceedings, transfer-of-liability proceedings, undisclosed-source proceedings. Each island has its own rules and its own dangers.
An entrepreneur arriving here for the first time sees chaos. A lawyer who has spent years here sees a map.
We have that map.
