2024

One of the powers that the Tax Agency has to ensure the correct fulfillment of tax obligations is to obtain financial information, as established in article 93 of the General Tax Law (LGT).

On November 18, the Business Margins Observatory (OME) was published with data up to the third quarter.

One of the questions raised by the approach to the different assumptions of tax liability included in articles 42 and 43 of the General Tax Law is their nature and, specifically, whether they should be classified as sanctions and, consequently, the rules of the sanctioning regime and its guarantees should be applied to them.

In recent weeks, two statistics have been published that exploit tax information on personal income from a municipal perspective.

The transfer of the so-called “aggressive tax planning” from the liquidation phase to the collection phase that has taken place in recent years has been characterized, among other behaviors, by the location by debtors of their assets and rights of economic content in tax jurisdictions other than those in which the tax debt is generated, as the main strategy to hinder seizure actions.

In early September, the Statistics on Wealth Tax Declarants for the year 2022 was published.

Once the annual income tax and corporate tax returns have been submitted, the first information on the evolution of business results in 2023 is available from company accounts.

The Personal Income Tax Return Statistics for the year 2022 has recently been published. It should be noted that these statistics have been available in their current format since 2003, but the original publications from previous years (1992-2002) are also available in electronic format, which allows for a 30-year time perspective of the tax.

On May 29, the Resolution of May 13, 2024, of the General Directorate of the State Tax Administration Agency, was published in the BOE, establishing the procedure for telematically carrying out the seizure of credits derived from collection through point-of-sale terminals (hereinafter, TPV ) in credit institutions and payment service providers.

The importance of information in the technological advances of recent years and the challenges it entails for people's privacy have made the right to the protection of personal data one of the main protagonists of the legal conflicts that are emerging around new technologies, to the point of having been described in some forums as the fundamental right of the 21st century.

Some taxpayers file their Personal Income Tax return with errors of a not very high amount, the correction of which can be carried out by the taxpayer themselves voluntarily, without any verification procedure being initiated by the AEAT, through the new "Complementary Calculated" service of the Personal Income Tax for the year 2023.

When the tax authorities, in the exercise of their legally attributed powers, decide to seal a safe deposit box as a precautionary measure, the allegation referring to the violation of the right to privacy recognized in article 18.1 of the Spanish Constitution is relatively frequent.

Within the set of information that forms the tax statistics covering the most varied aspects, personal companies (the self-employed) can be analyzed in great detail through the statistics of Income from economic activities . This publication takes advantage of the information that these entrepreneurs provide in their annual Personal Income Tax returns. The economic and tax information contained in the declaration, together with your personal characteristics, provides a complete overview of this type of company. The latest published information corresponds to the 2021 financial year (the next publication is scheduled for November of this year 2024).

The tax statistics that have been published in recent weeks close the data for the first quarter of the year and allow us to make an initial assessment of the evolution of the economy in that period. The set of graphs accompanying these lines illustrate the main results.

In response to taxpayers' demands, a new service is offered on the AEAT's electronic headquarters with the aim of facilitating and speeding up the completion of certain procedures in tax penalty procedures and in those of surcharges and late payment interest for late submission of self-assessments.

The powers of the Central Coordination Unit in matters of Crimes against Public Finance (UCCDHP) are detailed in section THREE.1 of the Resolution of March 24, 1992, of the AEAT, on organization and attribution of functions to the inspection of taxes within the scope of the competence of the Department of Financial and Tax Inspection:

In the Tax Agency's strategic plan for 2024-2027, one of its main pillars, along with taxpayer assistance, preventive actions and the communication strategy, fraud control appears, as it could not be otherwise.

In recent years we have witnessed numerous exceptional situations. Among the most notable, due to their more global and widespread effects, we find the pandemic caused by the Covid-19 virus in 2020 and the War in Ukraine, following its invasion by Russia on February 24, 2022.

Royal Decree 117/2024, of January 30 (BOE January 31, 2024), in point three of its Second Final Provision, has modified article 9 of the General Collection Regulations, making it possible for both payment institutions and electronic money institutions to access the status of collaborators in state collection management and, even, to an eventual provision of the cash service in the Delegations of the State Tax Administration Agency (AEAT) and in customs, which until now was reserved for credit institutions (Banks, Savings Banks and Credit Cooperatives).

On March 23, 2021, the Supreme Court issued two judgments (appeals numbers 3688/2019 and 5270/2019), in which it concluded that the verification of the requirements for the application of special tax regimes must necessarily be carried out by the competent bodies, through the inspection procedure.

The 2023 Annual Tax Collection Report was published on Thursday, April 25.

Since its creation, the Tax Agency has established the prevention and fight against tax fraud as fundamental and permanent strategic objectives.

Prior to the current Social Security pension system, social security in our country was organised through various mutual societies of different nature. In short, labour mutual societies (Social Security management entities), mutual societies that substitute Social Security management entities and mutual societies that complement Social Security.

The regulatory framework delimiting the territorial jurisdiction in Tax Inspection is defined by Law 58/2003, of December 17, General Tax (hereinafter LGT ), by the General Regulation of the actions and procedures of tax management and inspection and development of the common rules of the procedures for the application of taxes (hereinafter RGAT ) and by the rules of organization of the Tax Administration.

Recently, the Fourth Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union ( CJEU ) has issued a ruling, dated February 22, 2024, in case C-674/22, in which it resolves a request for a preliminary ruling on the interpretation of Union law, pursuant to Article 267 TFEU, by the Rechtbank Gelderland (Court of First Instance, Gelderland, Netherlands), in the proceedings between the Municipality of Dinkelland, (Netherlands) and the Ontvanger van de Belastingdienst/Grote ondernemingen, kantoor Zwolle (Tax Collection Authority/Large Businesses, Zwolle office, Netherlands), in relation to the latter administration's refusal to pay compensatory interest to the Dinkelland City Council on an amount of VAT that was returned to it.

Law 34/2015, of September 21, partially amending General Tax Law 58/2003, of December 17, incorporated article 95 bis, which enables the Administration to publish a list of defaulters due to debts or sanctions to the Spanish Public Treasury, and which is configured as an exception to the general principle of confidentiality of tax data.

Supreme Court Judgment No. 130/2023, of February 2, appeal for cassation No. 5225/2020, has dismissed the appeal filed by the State Attorney's Office against the Judgment of June 9, 2020, issued by the Seventh Section of the Administrative Litigation Chamber of the National Court in appeal No. 69/2019.

As is known, on December 6, 2023, Royal Decree 1007/2023, of December 5, was published in the BOE, approving the Regulation that establishes the requirements that must be adopted by computer or electronic systems and programs that support the billing processes of entrepreneurs and professionals, and the standardization of billing record formats; all of this in direct development of the new letter j) introduced in article 29.2.j) of the LGT, by means of law 11/2021, of July 9, on the prevention and fight against tax fraud.

Recently published tax statistics allow us to begin to have a complete overview of what 2023 was like. In the last month, the data for December on sales, employment and wages of Large Companies and foreign trade have been known, as well as the data for the fourth quarter on sales, employment and wages of Large Companies and of corporate SMEs . The latter also close the year for the Business Margins Observatory . Likewise, the annual information has been completed in the Statistics on the Registration Tax of Motor Vehicles . The information on December's revenue collection is still pending, and will be published, as usual, at the end of March.

In recent years, the need for information regarding the transformation that the economy is undergoing, mainly due to digitalization, has become evident. The Tax Administrations, aware of the importance of national and international information, are trying to agree on models for obtaining information that facilitate the exchange between Tax Administrations.

In any field where technical language is used, there is always a debate between the necessary understanding that we must facilitate in the receiver and the essential need for precision that good practice demands from the sender. That said, and to the extent that society is demanding that we make an effort to simplify matters in order to improve communication with citizens, the Tax Agency has already included this as one of its objectives in its strategic planning for 2020-2023.

The fundamental mission of the Tax Agency is to promote and ensure the correct application of the tax system. In order to fulfil this task, the Agency must carry out a series of actions that guarantee and facilitate the payment of tax debts, as well as the execution of collection procedures, both for debts of a tax nature and for other debts whose management has been entrusted to the Tax Agency.

All individual information on salaries available to the Tax Agency comes from the annual informative declaration of withholdings on work and economic activity income (form 190), which employers must submit, regardless of the number of employees, their salaries, their withholdings or the period of the year in which they have been employed.

It is no secret that in recent times the Tax Agency has undertaken a series of measures aimed at facilitating not only the fulfillment by citizens of their tax obligations but also the exercise of their rights.

The main strategic objective of the Tax Agency is to improve voluntary compliance with tax obligations. To achieve this objective, it implements a variety of measures, including civic-tax education, assistance and information for taxpayers, prevention of tax and customs fraud, post-clearance control actions, the promotion of anti-fraud regulatory changes, collaborations with other organizations, cooperative relations, etc.

The main objective guiding the actions of the Tax Agency is to improve compliance during the voluntary period, increasing the induced effect of its control actions and decreasing the weight of the quantitative results obtained in these activities.