Just over half of all companies registered in Malta did not file their 2022 tax returns, Finance Minister Clyde Caruana told parliament on Monday.

24,511 companies of the 48,843 registered in Malta last year failed to submit their papers, Caruana said in reply to a parliamentary question by PN MP Graham Bencini.

17,481 companies of the 45,767 that had been registered by the previous year also failed to submit their 2021 tax returns to the Inland Revenue Department.

Informed sources said there were a myriad of reasons why companies failed to submit their documents. Some claimed they did not make profits and others were still in the process of auditing their accounts. Yet all of them could be subject to incremental fines for as long as their failure continued.

Last year Caruana revealed that more than half of businesses in Malta were not VAT compliant, and in 2022 he told Times of Malta that just 35-40% of businesses declared a profit in 2019.

In a reply to a separate parliamentary question on Monday, Caruana also revealed that fewer than half of companies have accounts in Maltese banks.

Caruana said that data collected from the Malta Business Registry and other information in the Centralised Bank Account Register administered by the FIAU revealed that by August 2022, "roughly 42 per cent of Maltese companies had a bank account with a Maltese IBAN" number.