Spanish Taxpayers Declare 87,700 Million Euro in Assets Abroad

• 131,411 asset abroad declarations were made in total
• Hefty fines will be imposed if it is discovered that information is inaccurate or missing
• The last day in which declarations could be submitted was 30 April 2013

President of the Spanish government, Mariano Rajoy, has revealed that as a result of the 720 Model assets declaration measure brought in to combat tax fraud and evasion, 131,411 fiscal residents in Spain have declared assets worth almost 87,700 million euro outside of the country.

This figure is the equivalent to 9% of Spain’s Gross Domestic Product.

The President went on to say that he expected a sum around the 40,000 million euro mark to be declared, the same amount that was generated via the tax amnesty at the end of last year, and that he was pleased with the results of the Anti-fraud legislation.

A total of 131,411 declarations were made; 129,925 by individual persons and the remaining 1,486 by firms and companies.

Assets valued at 67,100 million euro (76.5%) pertain to the individual taxpayers that filed their declaration, whilst 20,590 million euro (23.5%) belongs to the Spanish firms and companies.

Fiscal residents were allowed four months from 31 December 2012 until 30 April 2013 to make their declaration, which was done by electronically filling out a 720 Model application via the Internet. By the middle of March, just one and a half months before the declaration period expired, only 3,000 tax residents had declared their assets abroad, which included bank accounts, pensions, property, shares, bonds etc, meaning that in the last 45 days 128,411 rushed to get their declarations in.

The sudden rush was most likely prompted by the severe financial penalties to be imposed for things like not making a declaration, for omitting information or by filing the declaration late. All of the above carry a minimum of a 5,000 euro fine.

Now that the Tax Authority have this information in their possession, it will be stored on a database and used to discover whether people are declaring their assets abroad and paying the relevant amount of tax on them.

At the current moment, however, this declaration is only informative and no extra tax will have to be paid. That is not to say that this won’t change in the future.

The whole idea behind the asset declaration measure is to combat tax fraud and evasion and close the net on those who are not paying.

Source: www.expansion.com, www.diarioinformacion.com