Tax office while being a scary place also is a helpful place. Surely, this is to be taken with a grain of salt, but knowing our rights and what procedures to follow is important.
One of such things is appealing the sanctions and decisions made by the tax office. Every now and again out of the blue you will receive a notification about something they need to communicate to you. Each and every communication (that is not an embargo notice) comes with a possibility of an appeal. To make it a bit clearer, this is what happened to us recently:
We filed T2 reports as required, close to midnight of July 20th (haha) and paid all the tax applicable. When preparing for T3 I realised there was a tiny mistake in our filing and we overpaid the tax. Keen on having all things correct I’ve submitted another form with correct information and marked it as “complimentaria” and reference to the initial one.
Imagine my surprise when couple of weeks ago we receive a letter from the tax office fining us for 100 euro (75 if you pay promptly) for late tax return submission!
Steps that I followed right after reading these unpleasant news:
Make an appointment with the tax office, department of fines and charges
Collect and print all paperwork. In my case it was both tax returns and the letter from them.
Go to the appointment to find out more and possibly file the appeal. My trip to the tax office was pretty useless, to be honest. Fines “department” was very surprised by my query, tried to claim that it’s correct and if there are any corrections to be made, they need to be filed differently. How differently they failed to elaborate and sent me off to a different desk. Second desk told me not to ever file correctional returns for income tax, since it all evens itself out (you do have to include all year in any given report) and that they can’t help me sort this out. Upset and confused after these conversations I didn’t file the appeal that day, but went home to think on it.
File the appeal. Can be done without an appointment at any moment that the tax office is open via “registro general”. They scan all of your papers and give you proof of submission. Keep in mind you usually only have 10 days since you have received the notification!
Get the decision. Within less then a week we received our letter stating that the procedure is closed as all our tax forms were submitted on time! Whoop whoop :)
While we hope you never have to file appeals with the tax office, it’s good to know that it can be done and even successfully every now and again!
