Barcelona City Council has proposed for the year that is about to begin to improve the efficiency of the local tax system, pursue tax evaders and finally enforce their obligations to all potential taxpayers who, in some cases due to bad faith and in others, due to lack of information, they dodge the payment of taxes, public prices, fines and other income from the Barcelona City Council.
The objectives of the City Council for 2023 are reflected in the tax control plan for this year, whose general guidelines were approved on December 2 by the councilor for the Treasury, the socialist Montserrat Ballarín.
The document that will serve as a guide to the inspection action of the municipal administration specifies that the main of these objectives is "to prevent fraud and fight against it" and that to achieve this purpose "it is necessary to reduce the administrative burdens that taxpayers have to face and facilitate voluntary compliance with tax obligations”.
One of the rules imposed by the Institut Municipal d'Hisenda, which is chaired by Councilor Ballarín herself, is precisely to apply an "understanding language" and clear communication on the website of the local treasury so that it is much easier to be up to date of tax obligations, thus promoting telematic and videoconference assistance to reduce the need for face-to-face assistance and, ultimately, simplify and improve procedures and increase the number of operations that can be carried out over the Internet.
Barcelona City Council has detected that there are many people who do not comply with these tax obligations. To remedy this, it will develop several lines of action. The first will be the in-depth inspection and control of large taxpayers, focusing especially on companies that operate supply services, real estate activity and the gaming sector.
It is also planned to transfer the fight against fraud to the collection phase, prioritize the investigation of undeclared taxable events and intensify electronic inspections.
The plan for 2023 defines a series of sectors on which the inspection will focus in the coming months. This is the case of general supply service companies, to act on them if they do not submit a declaration of gross income or do so only partially. The same will happen with mobile phone companies.
Likewise, the tax control plan proposes, in accordance with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice, to review the tax benefits of non-profit entities and of the different churches that have traditionally enjoyed exemptions in the payment of taxes.
The inspection plan specifies, on the other hand, that economic activities that "may involve more risk of fiscal deviation" will be investigated. Business groups and large companies are included in this category. Specifically, special pressure will be exerted on companies engaged in majority trade; those of fast food –especially those that use the internet as a sales channel–; building promotion companies –the verification will focus on the declaration regarding the square meters sold and those not declared–; energy traders and gambling companies.
The inspection plan of the Institut Municipal d'Hisenda will also affect the tax on constructions, facilities and works. In this area, it will focus on the administrative verification of the real and effective cost of the works to carry out the final settlement. And with regard to the capital gains tax, among other measures, it is planned to investigate the cases of transfer of shares of a company that, in reality, conceal a transfer of real estate and cross-check the information of the deceased from all over Spain with the register of real estate tax (IBI) and the information provided by notaries to detect possible pockets of fraud.
As La Vanguardia already advanced on February 12 of this year, another of the objectives of the Barcelona treasury is to increase the fight against the leakage to other municipalities of the tax on mechanically-tracted vehicles (IVTM), popularly known as circulation tax.
This is one of the battles that councilor Montserrat Ballarín has been determined to win, and that in some cases has reached the courts of justice with favorable results for the Catalan capital's City Council. Between 2015 and 2018 alone, the City Council opened fifteen files on car rental companies that register their fleets outside of Barcelona despite the fact that this city is their main field of action.
The tax control plan for 2023 delves into this line from the calculation of the more than 15,000 vehicles that are estimated to be "relocated". It will focus on the "relocation of vehicle fleets to other municipalities." "Specifically - it is added in this correct taxation guide - the vehicle fleets of companies dedicated to the sale, rental, renting or leasing of cars that domicile their vehicles in municipalities that have a very low taxation for this tax, when their They carry out their main activity in Barcelona, if they do not have any activity, vehicles or personnel in these municipalities”.
In recent years, technicians and inspectors from the Barcelona City Council have come to visit the small municipalities where there were supposedly ghost branches of these companies and in most cases they have been able to verify personally and on the ground that there was no activity.
