3.3. Results obtained in accordance with other indicators established in previous years' Target Plans

The Objective Plans prior to 2018 included indicators referring to the results derived from fraud prevention and control actions. Under this name, the collection results of the Tax Agency's actions to combat fraud are measured.

However, these indicators offer a measurement of the Agency's control activities based on a cash criterion (settlements collected regardless of the year in which the settlement was carried out, fees collected that had been reported in the year or in previous years, late settlements entered, as well as denial of requested refunds), the global amount may be conditioned by extraordinary results that are not representative of the main activity of the Tax Agency, which will not adequately reflect the activity of the organization.

Furthermore, the objective of maximizing the results indicators of the fight against fraud may not be completely aligned with one of the basic functions entrusted to the Tax Agency, such as increasing voluntary collection. Although legislative measures have been adopted to increase self-assessed and deposited amounts (e.g. limitation of financial expenses, obligation to declare assets abroad, investment of the taxable person in VAT in real estate transfers...), their effectiveness would be limited if the behavior of the Tax Agency were subsequently passive.

Likewise, the indicators of results in the fight against fraud only reflect a part of the effects of the Tax Agency's activity, with a temporal vision reduced to a specific year, which can lead to being mistakenly understood as an incentive to obtain results in the short term to the detriment of carrying out preventive actions or checks of greater complexity and duration. Therefore, this exclusively quantitative form of monitoring must be overcome.

Tax revenues are conditioned by a series of external variables such as economic growth, the evolution of internal demand, the employment rate, inflation, regulatory changes, the pace of refunds... Therefore, its evolution is not a sufficiently consistent indicator of the evolution of voluntary compliance, which makes it difficult to recognize that the actions carried out by the Tax Agency also have an impact on said evolution.

All these issues and the greater orientation aimed at assistance and fraud prevention actions, as reflected in the 2020-2023 Strategic Plan and its addenda, advise measuring the actions of the Tax Agency through other indicators. The indicator that would most reliably reflect how fiscal behavior evolves in our country is the one that compares the differential evolution of the aggregate tax bases with that of the reference macroeconomic magnitudes, since a constant line of action of the Tax Agency is to guide their actions to the emergence and widening of tax bases.

Without prejudice to the above, information is offered on the results obtained in 2022 in accordance with the anti-fraud results indicators included in the Objective Plans from years prior to 2018.

The collection results in the prevention and fight against fraud of the Tax Agency reach a total amount of 16,675 million euros in 2022, which represents a decrease of 1.31% compared to the previous year. However, it must be taken into account that in 2021 there were reductions in fractional payments and extraordinary files from the Customs and Special Taxes area, which are difficult to repeat in the future and, in fact, in 2022 the reductions for files of these characteristics will be have significantly reduced. Discounting these extraordinary events in both years, the results of fraud prevention and control grew by 2.7% to reach 15,362 million euros.

In relation to this overall result, the efficiency index measures the amount earned by these actions to combat fraud for each euro spent at the Tax Agency. To calculate it, the following magnitudes are used:

The numerator includes, in millions of euros, the amount obtained through the fight against tax and customs fraud.
The denominator includes, in millions of euros, the amount of the annual budget of the Tax Agency, in terms of recognised obligations. It includes the cost of all the functions performed by the Tax Agency, since they all contribute to the fulfilment of its mission of ensuring the correct application of the State's tax and customs system.

According to the efficiency index, in 2022, for every euro spent in the Agency, 10.48 euros have been collected in the fight against fraud, a figure slightly lower than the previous year.

Data and graphs related to this issue are found in Annex Table 16. Efficiency index .

The total amount is made up of two parts: “Results of the prevention and control of tax and customs fraud” for which 15,862 million euros have been obtained in 2022 and “Other results of the prevention and control of tax and customs fraud” with a result in this same period of 813 millions of euros.