If you have a car, motorcycle or van subject to the tax on CO₂ emissions - it is only paid in Catalonia - we recommend that you check if you are paying what you owe or if you are being charged more than necessary. A person who wants to identify himself as David contacted RAC1.cat to explain his particular case. This citizen was surprised when he received the notification corresponding to the tax on his car because, according to the Catalan Tax Agency (ATC), he had to pay 228 euros, and this figure seemed excessive for the type of vehicle he had. That's why he decided to check it out for himself.
As expected, doing so was not an easy task. To begin with, the payment letter does not establish the most important data: the level of CO₂ emissions on which the amount of the tax is determined.
After some verification operations that we will explain below, David saw that his car does not emit the 357 g/km that the vehicle registry indicated, but that it actually emits 235 grams of CO₂ per kilometer, a much lower figure than, according to the simulator of the same ATC, would mean paying an amount of 87 euros, and not 228.
David shared this situation with his acquaintances, and some of them verified that they were also paying more than necessary: the emissions level of their car was not at all what the ATC indicated.
The DGT provides this individual data for each vehicle to the ATC, which applies it to calculate what each driver will have to pay. Difficulties begin to appear in vehicles prior to November 2015, which is when the DGT began to integrate the emissions level into the technical sheet. Previously registered vehicles do not have this information in the technical sheet and, therefore, the DGT cannot provide it to the ATC.
The Catalan Tax Agency, therefore, has not received a specific CO2 figure on older cars, but it still continues to apply the tax. So where do you get the emissions level for pre-November 2015 vehicles? This is the key.
Sources from the Department of Economy of the Generalitat have explained to RAC1.cat that, in the absence of specific data from the DGT, the ATC resorts to the Guide to emissions by model and year of manufacture of passenger cars prepared by the IDAE (Institute for Diversification and Energy Saving, an organization that belongs to the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge).
It is a page with dozens of PDF documents classified by year of manufacture, where data appears on almost all brands, models and variants of each car, including the level of emissions, since 2002.
According to Economía, only in the event that the make and model do not appear in the IDAE database is the estimation formula applied. When the tax on CO₂ emissions was created in 2020, the ATC asked the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to develop a formula that tried to approximate as much as possible how much CO₂ each vehicle emits, based on other data that does appear in the technical sheet, such as displacement, power, age, tare or maximum weight of the vehicle.
“This comes from afar. It is an estimate using a very complex calculation formula. Many people have made allegations, but it continues to be an unknown thing,” Joan Blancafort, general secretary of the Catalan Federation of Motor Vehicle Sellers (FECAVEM), explains to RAC1.cat. The magic formula that is finally being applied is the one we show in the following image.
As you can see, it is not at all simple and, in many cases, the resulting value does not correspond to the real emissions. There is an alternative way to obtain this information, which is to request a certificate from the brand that includes CO₂ emissions.
All manufacturers should have this information and theoretically should be able to provide it to the user, but this situation is not regulated and can be a headache depending on the brand, which, in addition, can charge a significant amount for the management (at least David was asked for almost 200 euros for the certificate).
Although Economy claims that, in the absence of the data in the technical sheet, they obtain the emissions from the historical base of the IDAE, David personally consulted his real emissions from the aforementioned PDFs and detected that the ministry documents gave a figure lower than that stipulated in the vehicle registry (235 instead of 357 g/km). This can sometimes involve subtle differences in the names and abbreviations of the models and variants of each car.
With this information, David presented the corresponding appeal, it was accepted and he started to pay 87 euros, instead of the initial 228. This appeal can be filed in person or digitally (from the same page of the registry), right where the tax settlement appears. Now that this year's provisional register has been published, David already has the corrected emissions data. He will not have to complain again.
In addition to possible differences between the IDAE and the data collected by the ATC, the estimation formula may give rise to inaccuracies. That is why we recommend doing the check in each individual case and checking if our specific model appears in the IDAE, or looking in the vehicle's original documentation if the emissions data appears. “The ATC obtains the figures from sources of information that are not cross-referenced, this is the problem,” adds Blancafort.
That said, the Department of Economy also wants to make it clear that, although it was expected that the rate of this tax would increase and that each year it would be necessary to pay more for the same emissions, this rate has been frozen since its implementation. In the same way, it was also planned to lower the threshold and make people pay for an increasingly lower volume of emissions, but in the end this has not been done and, for the moment, those who emit less than 120 g/km do not have to pay anything.
“It has been softened a lot, because they have realized that this tax has not been received at all well,” says Blancafort from the employers' association FECAVEM, an entity positioned against the tax from the first moment. “For individual drivers, enough is enough. But for those people who have several vehicles, what they do is register them outside of Catalonia and thus they do not pay the CO₂ tax or many others, so they drive here, but the taxes go to other communities.”
This article was originally published on RAC1.
