The Spanish authorities must be getting desperate for money - the papers have been full of scary stories about the tax office (Agencia Tributaria) saying how they are going to raise billions of Euros by cracking down on tax fraud. News of last year's haul even made the New York Times as everyone worries about the prospect of Spain struggling to finance its budget deficit (Spanish fraud crackdown nets 10 billion). This year's priority is to cooperate with the Social Security department to catch people operating in the, erm, "informal" economy without registering for tax. The intention is to use new powers to demand information from utility companies, credit card providers and banks.
The full story is on our website Authorities tackle tax avoidance in Spain but a couple of aspects to all this are worth highlighting. The first is a new rule in force from 2011 but applying to transactions that go back to 2010, that all banks report all transactions over 3.000 with the following details:
- name and NIE (or company name and CIF) of payer/recipient
- amount
- whether deposit, withdrawal or transfer
- date account
Worth bearing in mind if you are paying for a property partly in cash or making a gift transfer which should be declared for gift tax (see explanation Spanish Gift Tax).
Also the Agencia Tributaria are keen on catching more people who don't declare rental income. Already they boast of trapping 200.000 shifty landlords by simply requiring that anyone claiming a tax deduction for rent paid has to state the catastral reference (Land Registry number) of the house or apartment on their tax return. This is used to check the owner's tax return to see if they have declared the income. The once sleepy Spanish tax authorities are waking up!
I believe that tax authorities are also checking rental websites such as ownersdirect.co.uk and homelidays.com to see who is renting what. They then match the guest comments and / or availability to the property owner's tax filing.
ReplyDelete