The next income campaign appears on the calendar. With less than three months until another appointment with the Treasury, some are still waiting for the Tax Agency to receive the refund of last year’s settlement. There are about 375,000 taxpayers. When will they get paid and why do they endure this delay?
Despite six months having passed since the settlement of the last income, in general terms “the majority of them will be declarations that will be verified in more depth,” explain sources from the Tax Agency. It is a step in which internal data or data with other entities are crossed to compare information that is not known to you. If things still don’t add up, you can request additional information from the taxpayer. “The Tax Agency usually checks more those declarations that have changes to the draft, not so much in case they come out to be deposited or paid,” says Aitor Fernández, tax expert at the digital consultancy TaxDown.
These verifications usually occur when there are “alterations with respect to the draft”, he reiterates, because it is information that he did not have in his possession a priori. For example, the birth of a child in the last months of the year that is not registered, the benefit of a new deduction or regularizations not made in other years. It is also common with self-employed workers, to check possible irregularities since the AEAT does not have control of all the information for the year – such as invoices or expenses -. Or it may be due to having entered data incorrectly “These things can lead us to a verification, but not all of them end in a requirement,” he explains.
After this, which lasts months for some, three scenarios emerge. That the return is correct after reviewing the declaration; that the amount be reduced; or “worst case scenario”, that really pays off. In the latter case, the taxpayer would also have to pay a fine, which will depend on the amount that the Treasury has failed to pay. “In the figures in which we taxpayers work, it can normally be 50% of the amount, but it is reduced if it is paid within a certain period and ends up being 20%-30% for real purposes.”
The 375,000 taxpayers who have not yet received payment are about 27,000 more than those who were expecting payment at the beginning of last year. It does not mean that the Treasury has been slower, since there have been some 1.18 million more declarations requesting a refund. In comparison, the Tax Agency highlights that the ratios of declarations paid over those requested “are practically the same as the previous year on the same dates.” Using the data, we see that last year in January, 97.49% of refund requests had been paid, compared to 97.51% in the most recent campaign, with a slight increase. Thus, only 2.5% is pending collection.
Some declarations will go faster, others slower, but 80%-90% of those that are pending resolution “the most normal thing at the start of the next campaign (April 3) is that they have been returned or resolved,” says Fernández for the experience of other exercises. The rest will remain in process or with a conflict between the parties about who is right, he details.
The Tax Agency reports that the files to be reviewed begin to be processed in September or October (2023) and are normally closed “well before” the six-month period to work on them from the moment the taxpayer is notified of the start of the verification. There is no forgetting, but some extra patience is required.
The consolation for those who have not been paid is that from January 1, 2024, six months after the end of the campaign, late payment interest is applied on unpaid amounts. The interest is 4.0625% per year, according to the most recent General State Budgets. In any case, the rate is prorated for 366 days of the year. If it is collected on January 22, the debt will not be paid with 4.0625% interest, but rather the figure for those 22 days will be calculated. In this example it would be equivalent to an interest of 0.24%, which in practice can be translated “into just a few cents or euros,” Fernández calculates. “They are very small amounts that do not compensate for not having had that money available all this time.” In general terms, returns are usually less than 1,000 euros, with around 100-500 euros as the usual trend, the expert points out.