Hacienda won 75% of the trials for tax crimes in 2017

Hacienda won 75% of the trials for tax crimes in 2017

The director of the Tax Agency admits that the agency increasingly has more information from taxpayers: "We are doomed to Big Brother"

   Facing the Tax Agency in the courts is increasingly synonymous with defeat for the taxpayer. And is that the treasury won in 2017 75% of trials for tax crimes. Specifically, of the 376 judgments issued on this matter last year, 282 cases were favorable to the institution. A percentage of success that has skyrocketed if one takes into account that in 2012 the judges only found him right in 57% of the opinions. "We would like not to have to report tax crimes," said the director of the Tax Agency, Santiago Menéndez.

  However, despite this improvement, complaints of tax crimes have been reduced considerably in recent years. Thus, while in 2011 there was a maximum of 1,014 complaints that allowed to collect 909 million, in 2016 the complaints were reduced to 226 for which 278 million were collected according to the Memory of the Tax Agency.

Beyond tax crimes, Menéndez has also boasted of the good results in the judgments of the contentious-administrative area in which they did not give the reason to the taxpayer in 66.58% of the cases in 2017, against 57.6% of 2015.

The head of the agency explained during a conference on the 'tax inspection of large companies' organized by Deloitte that one of the objectives of the agency is to reduce conflict. That is why Menéndez has defended the cooperative relationship between taxpayers and the administration. In his opinion, this model must be based on "transparency" and mutual trust. In this sense, the director of the Agency has announced that a pilot program of business transparency is being carried out at the OECD level, in which the first data are positive for Spanish companies.

Tax on technology

Menéndez highlighted the technological innovation capacity of the Tax Agency, a fundamental requirement to analyze the amount of information it receives and that will be expanded with new mechanisms such as the automatic exchange of information between countries. "We are headed to Big Brother", has sentenced the director of the Agency. In his opinion, this reality can be seen negatively by thinking of an "invasion of the private sphere" or from a positive point of view before the possibility offered by all these instruments to improve controls and carry out "more transparency exercises".

Finally, the head of the agency has been confident that the Tax Agency has sufficient capacity to achieve the extra collection of "more than 1,000 million" contemplated in the stability plan through a new tax on technology (estimated at 600 million for 2018) and that will rise to 1.500 million in 2019 along with other tax measures.