The COVID-19 pandemic has affirmed the importance of social protection. To combat the effects of the pandemic, countries have taken exceptional measures to preserve health and have introduced or adapted measures to provide income support to people who have lost their sources of income. The pandemic has also highlighted the weaknesses of the social protection system in Morocco, introduced in 1940, which is composed of a contributory system whose financing depends on social security contributions and regulations, and a subsidiary system which takes into covers people who do not have access to contributory basic social insurance. The kick-off for the implementation of the social protection reform in Morocco was given in April 2021 and should be spread over five years. The objective of this reform is to reorganize and improve the operation of the various social protection instruments with a view to greater effectiveness and increased efficiency and also to create new components likely to extend coverage. This large-scale reform initiated by Morocco requires an annual envelope estimated at 51 billion dirhams, which constitutes a major challenge for the country’s public finances, which have been hit by the COVID-19 crisis.

With the signing of several bilateral and regional free trade agreements, Morocco has moved towards an economy that advocate international openness and market liberalization. It had to develop a strategy to help local businesses, made up mainly of small and medium-sized enterprises, to face international competition. It is in this logic that the Moroccan legislator has introduced measures into the general tax code with the aim of encouraging concentration and restructuring operations of companies in order to enable them to increase their performance and their competitiveness in the face of international competition. Indeed, these concentration and restructuring operations, called mergers, involve tax risks. This article aims to provide a clarification of the concept of tax risk, to present the forms of mergers proposed by Moroccan legislation and to shed light on the tax risk that these operations may entail.