FAQs

The Sales, Employment and Wages reports exploit the information of an economic nature contained in the VAT return forms and the deductions for income from work and professional activities.These declarations include information on sales (domestic and exports), imports, employment and wages, in addition to the variables for settling the respective taxes.This economic information, once it has been properly processed from the statistical point of view, constitutes the source of the data contained in the reports and provides an indication of the economic situation.

There are two Sales, Employment and Wages reports:the monthly is for large companies, and the quarterly for large companies and SMEs.The first uses the information from the monthly VAT return forms and the Deductions on Employment Income of Large Companies.These companies have been obliged to file their declarations electronically since 1999.The quarterly report exploits the previous monthly declarations and also the declarations of SMEs in the form of a corporation or a limited liability company.The latter are obliged to file their returns on a quarterly basis, although for VAT they must do so monthly if they are registered in the Monthly Return Register or, in general, if they wish to do so voluntarily.Since the third quarter of 2008, they have been required to file their returns electronically.

Large companies in tax terms are those individuals or companies whose volume of operations exceeded 6.01 million euros in the previous year.The determination of the volume of transactions is made in accordance with Article 121 of Law 37/1992 on VAT.

For the purposes of this publication, corporate SMEs are all those companies in the form of a corporation or limited liability company that are not large companies.It follows that there may be other SMEs that are not included in the group under analysis in these statistics (e.g. cooperatives, joint ventures or economic interest groupings).The reason for including only corporate SMEs is that they are the only ones that are obliged to file their returns electronically (Order EHA/3435/2007 of 23 November) and therefore form a homogeneous group over time.

The geographical scope is the so-called Common Taxation Area;that is, companies that operate exclusively in the territories managed by the tax authorities of the Basque Country and Navarre are excluded and, in the case of the variables obtained from the VAT return forms, the companies that do so in the territories that are outside the scope of application of said tax (the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla).

Taxpayers submit only one return (monthly or quarterly) for all their activity within the territory subject to the tax, without distinguishing where sales have been made or wages subject to withholding have been paid.Taxpayers usually file their returns at the place where they have their tax address.Therefore, the territorial information that could be published would be accumulated in those territories where there is a greater concentration of tax addresses.

The monthly VAT returns must be filed by the 30th day of the month following that in which they are due, except for accruals from January, which must be filed by the last day of February.In all other cases (quarterly VAT and monthly and quarterly withholding tax), the deadline is the 20th of the month following the accrual period.

The companies that meet the requirement of turnover in the previous year form the Large Companies Register which, by definition, varies each year, but remains fixed throughout the year.This means that the variations in the variables observed over the course of a year are due, on the one hand, to changes in the variable and, on the other, to the updating of the Large Companies Register at the beginning of the year.To avoid the problem of this variation in the Register, only those companies that have submitted a return in two consecutive months are taken into account in the calculations of the monthly report, which is called constant population.By incorporating corporate SMEs into the analysis, it is possible to treat the whole group (large companies and SMEs) as a complete population and, therefore, it is not essential to analyse the constant population.

On the AEAT website, in the section dedicated to tax statistics, information can be found on the annual volume of sales of Large Companies and SMEs (Economic and tax results in VAT), as well as the wage bill paid by them (Labour market and pensions in tax sources).It should be noted, however, that comparisons must be made taking into account the different population groups, the unequal sectoral coverage and the different definitions of the variables in each of the sources.In the specific case of this publication, and as explained in the methodology, the data refer only to Large Companies and SMEs in the form of a corporation or limited liability company;activities related to energy, financial and insurance institutions, public authorities, education and health are excluded;and the definitions of the variables are subject to the requirements of the monthly and quarterly VAT and Withholding Tax forms for income from work and professional activities.