The Spanish Government moves to the Congress of Deputies to recover the refunds that the Tax Agency is obliged to make to large companies. They are the ones who appealed against the corporate tax reform promoted by Cristóbal Montoro in 2016 and who managed to get the Constitutional Court to partially overturn it. The consequence of the sentence involves returning up to 3,000 million throughout 2024 to various corporate groups. The Ministry of Finance is taking the hit but, through the PSOE, has presented an amendment to the anti-crisis bill to strengthen the regulations and recover the revenue it will lose.
Amendment 196, already registered by the PSOE group in the lower house, aims to "avoid the loss of revenue that implies the expulsion from the legal system of the legal provisions affected" by the sentence of the Constitutional Court. According to financial sources, this decrease in revenue will be between 2,000 and 3,000 million. Several Ibex companies have already admitted a positive fiscal impact on their profit and loss accounts as a result of the court decision. Telefónica has estimated the recovery of 541 million; IAG, 191 million; Railway, 37 million; Indra, 14.5 million, and FCC, 6.4 million.
The amendment specifies that the aim of the reform of the Corporation Tax law is to recover the limits on the compensation of negative tax bases for large companies annulled as a result of the judicial crackdown. However, in the registered text there is a tightening of the regulations which, according to Cristina Fernández, director of the Corporate Tax Services area of KPMG Abogados, involves more costly measures than the initial situation annulled by the Constitution. For example, according to the Cuatrecasas office, the text limits the compensation to companies with a turnover of at least 20 million euros to 50% or 25%. Montoro's norm placed it at 70%. In addition, the amendment provides for the full reversal in the 2024 financial year (and not in fifths, as contained in the Montoro decree) of the losses due to the deterioration of values that have not yet been reversed. César Florez, coordinator of the group of experts of the association of tax experts Aedaf, adds that the modification of the company tax should not "further increase the tax burden".
The PSOE must now seek the votes of its investiture partners to be able to push forward this amendment in Parliament and recover the loss of revenue.
