VAT fraud threatens Spain revenues
The European Commission published a report according to which the Iberian region stopped receiving about € 1,806 million during 2017
Spain stopped receiving €1,806 million euros from VAT in 2017, which represents 2% of the 75,107 million it should have collected in full for that concept, according to a report published by the European Commission.
The figure is a percentage point lower than what was stopped entering in 2016, when €2,024 million were lost due to fraud, 3% of the 72,729 million that the Spanish tax authorities should have raised a year earlier.
At the time, Spain reduced the so-called “VAT gap” by ten percentage points since 2013, a year in which it amounted to 12% of the total and more than €8,100 million were lost. A year later it fell to 9% and in 2015 it fell to 4%.
Meanwhile, the European Union as a whole stopped receiving €137,500 million in 2017 for fraudulent VAT activities, a figure that represents 11.2% of the total and 8,000 million less than a year earlier.
This is the fifth year of the downward trend, but the European Commission noted that the gap “remains very high” and “once again highlights the need for global reform” of Community VAT rules and a greater cooperation between the Member States to fight fraud.
However, there are large differences in the VAT gap of the different Member States, ranging between 0.6% recorded in Cyprus and 35.5% observed in Romania. Other countries with high percentages are Greece (34%), Lithuania (25%), Italy (24%) or Slovakia (23%).
K. Tovar
Source: La Vanguardia
