The tax on large fortunes has already been rolling for a year and lawyers and tax advisors anticipate that in the coming months there will be a wave of checks by the Treasury to verify that the obligated taxpayers have paid—and correctly—the tax. “We have not yet seen inspections, we will look above all at the residence and the structure of the assets,” predicts the lawyer from a Madrid law firm expert in taxation. “Inspections are going to come,” another law firm predicts, citing as a compelling reason that the Government has announced that it intends to make permanent a tax that was initially created on a temporary basis.
The solidarity tax on large fortunes was approved at the end of 2022 and was collected for the first time – paid once a year – in July of the following year. The Tax Agency simply points out that the usual procedure states that after a certain time all new taxes are verified. What is not specified a priori is the degree of intensity of the controls. He Annual Tax and Customs Control Plan of the organization for 2024, published just this Thursday, indicates that “actions will be carried out for the analysis and, where appropriate, verification” of the new taxes, including the one that taxes large fortunes.
The offices consulted do predict strong verifications and believe that the administration's magnifying glass will fall mainly on Madrid, where the wealth tax has been subsidized for years and the great fortunes were not accustomed, as was the case in other autonomies, to planning their wealth to avoid it. or lower it. Everything is explained by the exemption of the family business, the largest reduction that the two taxes have. According to Constantino Vidal, managing partner of the Zadal firm, by having the original tax subsidized, in communities like Madrid the rich did not have to spend their efforts structuring the company to meet the requirements of the exemption. It also made no sense for the autonomy to monitor compliance, since “the resulting tax rate in any case would be zero,” he adds.
This changed radically at the end of 2022, when the temporary tax was announced and approved practically overnight. “Taxpayers did not have time to prepare or any room for maneuver,” acknowledges Alejandra Hernández, director of large assets at Atl Capital. For this reason, “it is foreseeable that the Tax Agency will focus on the first year's payments.” “In many cases they are significant amounts, so it is likely that there will be inspections,” adds Francisco González, director of wealth advisory at A&G Banca Privada.
Added to all this is another derivative explained by Alberto López, Ejaso's fiscal partner: the verification of the wealth tax corresponds to the autonomies and not to the Tax Agency, despite the fact that the inspectors themselves have asked to be able to monitor exemptions such as of the family business. This “has many requirements that must be verified and that the autonomous communities do not have the capacity to control with the level that the agency has, so many fortunes were exempt without meeting the requirements for it.” Now, however, the circumstance arises that the State Inspection will verify the tax reduction in a context in which “many very large assets have benefited from the exemption without meeting all the requirements for it,” says López.
The fact that the new tax is going to become fixed also encourages the theory that the Tax Agency will begin verifications on the restructurings after 2022. “There were those who decided to pay the solidarity tax, assuming that it would apply for two years, because it could The fiscal cost will be more efficient than adapting the structure for only two years,” adds Vidal. For this reason, Hernández points out, the movements made from 2023 onwards will also be looked at closely, when it was already suspected that the tax could end up being permanent.
From a large firm with offices in several Spanish cities, they clarify that the tribute “is very clear and does not lend itself to too many interpretations,” in addition to having a recent ruling from the Constitutional Court that supports it. “There may be disputes in specific cases, but it should not pose problems for taxpayers who have paid it correctly,” they point out. “Another thing is that the Treasury focuses on this tax for other reasons, since it has been a very important political decision.”
Harmonization
In fact, the Government created the new tax making it clear that its nature was not only collection. Its priority was to achieve some harmonization between territories in wealth taxation, a state tax whose management is in the hands of the regional governments, which have given it different treatments, causing great differences in the treatment of taxpayers. And it has achieved it: all the territories that had the regional tax partially or totally subsidized have recovered it so that their revenue remains in the regional coffers and does not go to the state treasury.
Madrid, the first to announce the return of the tax, is the autonomy that had most squeezed its regulatory capacity: for more than a decade no one in the community has paid the wealth tax, subsidized at 100%. It is not for nothing that it is the territory that brings together the largest fortunes in the country – both by number (19,508 in 2021, according to the Tax Agency) and by average declared wealth (10 million) -. It is also the one that has contributed the most to the new solidarity tax, which works in a complementary way to the wealth tax: it only affects fortunes of more than three million euros and that part of the wealth that has not been taxed by the autonomous communities.
In 2023, the first year in which it was charged, collected 623 million from 12,010 taxpayers —compared to the 231,367 who declare assets—. The majority resided in Madrid, which contributed almost 90% (555 million), followed by Andalusia and Galicia, the other two communities that had the wealth tax reduced, 100% for the first and 50% for the second. The average fee was 52,000 euros, according to the Treasury. Between the two taxes, the treasury brought in 1,868 million last year.
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