Spain: Treasury sends notices to undeclared vacation rental firms

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

The Tax Agency multiplied by more than five notices to lessee taxpayers in the 2017 Income Campaign, reaching 700,000 notices, and has raised real estate returns of more than 122,000 taxpayers in three years, with a broadening of bases taxable of more than 1,300 million euros.

This is stated in the report on the fight against tax fraud related to fiscal year 2018, which shows that last year (2017 Income Campaign), tax notices for taxpayers were considerably increased with respect to the previous two years of alleged landlords.

The Treasury has been making these notices in recent years by knowing, for example, that certain taxpayers have announced the rental of a property on Internet rental platforms. In this way, the AEAT has multiplied by more than five notices to this group of taxpayers, going from 136,600 notices in the Income of 2016 to generate almost 700,000 messages in the Income of 2017, made last year.

Likewise, the updated data on the impact of these advertising campaigns to increase real estate yields allow us to estimate an increase of more than 122,000 respondents of this item, 30.8% of the total increase in declarers of real estate capital returns since 2014.

As a consequence, a greater declared tax base for an amount of 1,346 million has been recorded, which would explain 57.6% of the total increase in real estate income for the period.

The rental platforms for tourist use housing began to provide the Tax Agency since last January to the tax data related to this activity, such as information from the hosts and details of their advertisements, which include the name and address, and their transactions since 2018, after the entry into force of the obligation to share the data of the hosts' reservations.

The Ministry of Finance gave more room to platforms such as Airbnb, HomeAway, Wimdu or Niumba to provide fiscal data, with an "exceptional" presentation of an annual nature for 2018, but quarterly for the rest of the years.

Therefore, it must be presented in relation to the operations carried out in each calendar quarter, within the period between the first and the last day of the calendar month after the end of the quarter to which the declaration refers.

This obligation led to the entry into operation of model 179 of the 'Quarterly informative declaration of the rental of housing for tourist purposes'.

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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