If you are an entrepreneur or employee, you have a series of obligations with the Treasury that you must fulfill although, sometimes and due to circumstances beyond your control, this is not possible.
In today’s article we inform you in detail of
when the debts with the Treasury are prescribed,
in addition to publicizing the rights and actions that you can put in place to solve this situation. Stay tuned!
What is the limitation period for debts granted to the Treasury?
If you find yourself in the situation of not being able to pay, it is important to know when debts with the Treasury are prescribed.
To do this, we must resort to Law 42/2015, of October 5, on Civil Procedure, which indicates that debts with the Treasury expire after 4 years from the next day on which the regulatory period ends to submit the declaration or self-assessment.
For the debt you have with the Treasury to prescribe, the creditor – in this case the Treasury – must not have exercised any judicial or extrajudicial action claiming the debt,the debtor (obliged to pay) must not have expressly or tacitly recognized the debt.
The period in which debts with the Treasury are prescribed is also interrupted if the declaration of a bankruptcy occurs.
Therefore, if the Treasury sends you requirements and insists on claiming the outstanding debt, they do not prescribe the debts with the Treasury and you will not be able to avoid having to pay the debt you have.
Rights and actions that prescribe when you have debts with the Treasury
In order for you to truly understand what prescription is, we must clearly define what we are referring to.
The concept “prescription” indicates that the Treasury will not be able to present us with a parallel declaration or demand the payment of the tax,or put a fine on us for failing to comply with our tax obligations.
The main debts that we can have with the Treasury are, in the case of individuals, the Income Tax.
In the case of companies or freelancers, we would talk about personal income tax, Corporation Tax,or quarterly VAT declarations, or those derived from business activity.
It is important that you know how to consult the debts with the Treasury to know if we can find ourselves in one of the cases of prescription of said debts or, on the contrary, some claim action has been initiated even if we are not aware of it.
To obtain this information, there is the possibility of carrying out this consultation electronically or in person in any delegation of the Administration.
Deferral and payment in instalments of debts to the Treasury
If we are obliged to pay and we do not have the economic possibility to do so, we can request the postponement of the debt by submitting a written request and agree with the Tax Agency its payment in instalments.
Remember that, when you file a tax, you can always request at that time to pay it in installments. In the case of Income Tax, 60% is paid when you file the tax and the remaining 40% a few months later.
To request the postponement we must bear in mind that they will not always grant it to us.
If the debt is produced by withholdings, if they come from payments on account, from State aid that must be repaid or if they are fractional payments of Corporation Tax, they will not grant us the deferral.
If the deferred debts are less than 30,000 euros, it is not required to provide guarantees. in the case of higher debts, the debtor must guarantee by bank guarantee or by providing some other type of guarantee.
We also have in some cases, the possibility of making the payment in kind of the tax debt in voluntary or executive period.
What happens if the debt with the Treasury is considered a tax crime?
The prescription of a tax crime debt does
not have the same limits. This term varies according to the amount of the unpaid debt:
- If you stop paying 120,000 euros corresponding to the tax quota, in this case the prescription would be 5 years.
- If the unpaid amount is 600,000 euros or more,it is considered an aggravated tax offense and the limitation period is 10 years and may even entail custodial sentences.
If it is important to know when the debt prescribes or what consequences it may have not to pay it, it is also essential that you know what the Tax Agency can require you to pay them.
First of all you will have to pay the fee to be paid resulting from the presentation of the tax, to this we will have to add the default interest (if you paid after the deadline or charged an amount greater than what corresponded to you).
How much is the default interest?
Default interest is the legal interest on the money in force at the time the tax was due, plus 25%,unless a different percentage is established in the State budget.
If the claim goes to trial, you will also have an increase in debt, so it is interesting to avoid reaching these extremes, especially if you are not clear that the judge can give you the reason.
conclusion
The
prescription of debts with the Treasury
can be a circumstance that can benefit us at a certain time and that we must take into account if we receive a debt requirement after the deadline. However, this is not always the case, and all assumptions must be taken into account.
