Two out of three tax advisers say they have increased their clients’ tax relocations to other countries since the new tax on large fortunes came into force, which partially homogenises wealth taxation between communities. The data is taken from the survey prepared by the Barcelona Institute of Economics (IEB-UB) which annually asks almost 5,000 tax advisors about the tax situation in Spain.
This tax equals the payment of taxes for large estates throughout Spain from 3.7 million. Regarding the consequences of this measure, tax experts claim that it will encourage relocation outside of Spain and discourage relocation between autonomous communities. Before the tax, in Madrid and Andalusia nothing was paid for patrimony, given that it was subsidized at one hundred percent.
From the responses of the tax experts, it can be inferred that this process of fleeing tax domiciles in search of an improvement in taxation will continue in the coming months. Almost 70% of advisers state in the survey that inquiries from their clients about changes of residence have increased. The most serious thing is that more than 40% maintain that most changes of tax residence abroad are fictitious. When it is within Spain, the percentage of those who believe that the change is false is even higher, of more than 50%.
Jose MarÃa Durán-Cabré, director of the IEB and co-author of the survey with Alejandro Esteller Moré, states that it is feasible that the increase in trips abroad is due to the new tax. The professor at the University of Barcelona adds that this process of increasing taxpayer evasion has continued throughout the four years that the survey has been carried out.
The IEB survey was published yesterday by the Register of Economists Assessors Fiscals (REAF), a body specialized in taxation of the General Council of Economists (CGE).
The respondents, to the questions about their perception of the State Tax Administration Agency (AEAT), consider it to be an entity “with very advanced technological means that tends to apply taxes with predominantly collection criteria”. In this sense, the respondents emphasized “the hardness of the verification procedures and, especially, of the management ones”.
At the same event, the REAF-CGE opined that the rise in corporate tax collection of 20.84% ​​in 2022 is mainly thanks to the evolution of business profits. The increase in tax revenues not only exceeds those of the year before the pandemic (2019), but also (by 50%) those of 2007.
