On 31 January 2024, Royal Decree 117/2024 of 30 January was published in the Official State Gazette (BOE), developing the rules and procedures for due diligence in the area of mandatory automatic exchange of information communicated by platform operators. Through our colleague Ànnia Melis (Fiscal, Barcelona) we spoke with the German Chamber of Commerce, which publishes a monthly newsletter on the German-Spanish world and the activities of the Chamber.
One of the purposes of this Royal Decree is to incorporate the self-assessment correction procedure into the regulations of the main taxes in the tax system, such as Value Added Tax, Personal Income Tax, Corporate Income Tax, Excise Duties and the Tax on Fluorinated Greenhouse Gases. The self-assessment correction replaces the current dual system of complementary self-assessment and request for rectification of self-assessments. Therefore, for all the aforementioned taxes, taxpayers must rectify, complete or modify the self-assessments submitted by submitting a self-assessment correction, using the return form approved by the head of the Ministry of Finance.
However, if the taxpayer’s correction is based solely on a well-founded allegation of a breach of the rules applied in the previous self-assessment under the provisions of another regulation of higher legal rank, the traditional self-assessment correction procedure may be chosen, i.e., by challenging the self-assessment itself. Self-assessment corrections must include both the details of the original self-assessment that remain unchanged and those that have been amended or added. They must also be submitted before the Administration’s right to settle the tax debt or the taxpayers’ right to claim the corresponding refund has expired.
If the debt resulting from the previous self-assessment is subject to deferment or payment in instalments, the submission of the self-assessment correction is considered to be a request for modification under the same conditions, in accordance with the provisions of the General Collection Regulations. In the VAT field, there are some exceptions where the self-assessment correction procedure does not apply, such as corrections of amounts unduly passed on to other taxable persons and corrections of amounts in transactions subject to special schemes for distance selling and certain domestic supplies of goods and services.
Similarly, in the case of companies subject to the special tax consolidation scheme, two self-assessment corrections must be filed: one for the tax group and another for each company included in the tax group.
