Israel's voluntary disclosure procedure closed on 31 August 2026, and the Tax Authority has not announced a new one. Someone who finds they have unreported income is left with the ordinary route: a request to amend the tax return. At the annual conference of the Israel Tax Advisers Bureau in Eilat, in October 2026, the investigations assessing officer for the Center region explained what happens to such a request once it is filed.
The request leaves the civil office
Under an internal Tax Authority procedure, he said, a civil assessing officer who receives a request to amend a return that adds turnover or income must pass it to the regional investigations assessing officer. That office decides how to handle it. The procedure has not been published, so this account rests on what he said on the panel.
Being passed on does not mean an investigation opens. He described a case that reached him the month before the conference: a person who had not reported about 200,000 shekels of income from a foreign bank account. The principal had already been taxed in the past, and the problem was only the income it had earned. In a case like that, he said, he sends the file back to the assessing officer with a simple instruction: sign an assessment agreement with the taxpayer, and the taxpayer pays the tax. "We have no interest in investigations," he said. "We don't want to hurt anyone."
Why next year is worse
He described a pattern every adviser knows. A client mentions 100,000 shekels of rental income that was never reported. This year there is a wedding and no spare cash, next year a family trip, and the amendment keeps sliding. Meanwhile the amounts grow. The bigger the sum, he said, the harder it becomes to explain and to report later on. At 100,000 shekels that will not happen, but at higher amounts the case can drift into money laundering territory.
His recommendation was to file the amendment now. A return amended on the taxpayer's own initiative, he stressed, always counts in their favour. Even if an investigation does open, and that does not happen in every case, the taxpayer can argue that the Authority did not have the information, that they disclosed it themselves, and that it was an error or negligence. On that basis they can ask for the file to be closed with a kofer, a monetary settlement paid instead of criminal proceedings.
Information the Authority already has
The real question is who reaches the information first. Reports from banks in Israel and abroad, exchanges with foreign tax authorities and reports from crypto exchanges already flow to the Authority, and it is moving to computer screening of every return. Once the information arrives from another direction, the argument "I was the one who disclosed it" is no longer available.
For a small business the takeaway is plain. Income that stayed out of the return by mistake, say a payment from a foreign client that landed in a personal account, is better corrected on your own initiative, with your accountant or tax adviser. Being passed to the investigations officer is a step in the procedure. In the foreign bank account case it ended with an assessment agreement and the tax paid.