The tax agency will start seizing cats, dogs and pets

Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2011, during Spain’s economic crisis. The references to “throughout 2011” and to the crisis reflect that moment.

Hacienda, Spain’s tax agency, the state body we’ve nicknamed “the State’s hitman” for the big role it’s playing in this crisis, keeps up its old tricks and still fails to understand, or rather to look at case by case, the needs and problems of some people. A reader has written to us about his own case. Overwhelmed and in a moment of deep bitterness, he tells us his situation and asks us for a way out, one that could be found as long as he weren’t up against a public body like the tax agency.

“This is the situation I’m living through. I’m 43 and I’ve been working since I was 16. I bought a house with a 30-year mortgage, and I still have 10 years left to pay.

In 2005 my company closed and I had to take a job at another one, where I signed payslips for far more than I was actually paid. That was the deal, and if I didn’t like it, I could simply leave. Those were my bosses’ words when I told them I didn’t agree. I ended up signing payslips for as much as €2,600 when I was really being paid €1,100.

I should say that although some of my co-workers reported this, the company was never penalized for these practices.

In the end, when the crisis hit, that company closed in 2007 and we were all out on the street. I signed on for unemployment benefit and looked hard for work, but found nothing, so I decided to start my own business, applying for the scheme that paid me all the unemployment benefit I was entitled to in one lump sum.

The business got going and I was more or less getting by, until labour inspectors and workplace health and safety inspectors started showing up every other day. Every visit cost me money, even though the only people I had on the payroll were my wife and one young woman, so I didn’t see the need for so many inspections of my premises.

They made my life impossible. They fined me several times for not having the electrical panels in the right place (the installation was already like that when I rented the premises), for officially approved signs that kept changing every other week, then there was the SGAE (Spain’s music royalties collecting society), and so on… in short, I was working for the state.

In the end I had to close the business, because on top of everything there were unpaid invoices, so I had to declare to the tax agency invoices that I had never even collected. This dragged on until I was the one who owed money to suppliers and to the bank itself.

In 2009 my ordeal began: I had no income and couldn’t pay my mortgage. The bank started threatening to repossess my house, my suppliers took me to court to collect small debts, and as if that weren’t enough, the state also started demanding back the money from the grant I had supposedly received.

I’ve already lost my house, and as if things weren’t bad enough, the tax agency sent me a letter demanding my 2007 income tax return, the year I signed those sky-high payslips I was never paid. I couldn’t pay what I owed that year, so now I’m even less able to pay that amount plus late-payment interest.

Even after I explained my precarious situation to the tax agency, I’ve just received a letter warning me that it will seize all my accounts and assets, right now, when the only possessions I have left are my daughter’s cat and my wife’s dog. That’s all that’s left for them to seize, and nobody has understood my situation.”

That’s this reader’s letter, and it saddens me a great deal, because it seems that a certain public body (the tax agency) is flouting the Constitution and a certain private institution (the banks) is violating human rights.

See also: Successful entrepreneurs: the man who had to start a business to save his children’s lives

So, far from being able to offer this person a solution, we’ll just send the tax agency a message:

Is there nothing better to do in those luxurious offices, no bigger fortune to chase? What right do you have to get paid before this person’s suppliers? And above all, I know money is money, but since when does your conscience not weigh on you for leaving a family on the street and in debt?

And one more thing: those big companies that are using the crisis to cut wages even when their profit margins are healthy have been asking about you. They tell me they haven’t seen you around in a long time. No wonder: you’re so busy squeezing private individuals for quick payments and making life impossible for small entrepreneurs that there’s no time left for the real tax dodgers.

The situation this reader describes will sound familiar to many people over the course of 2011, so a touch of “humanity” in some cases would be a nice gesture.

Hacienda somos todos (“We are all the tax agency”, as the official slogan says)! What a disgrace!

Featured image: Stuart Smith., CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.