Should I confirm the tax returns draft? No thanks!

On April 4, the deadline for filing the income statement began through the "Tax Agency" app, the Renta WEB website or by phone. Many taxpayers downloaded the app, a novelty this year, in order to present their returns to be returned as soon as possible. However, the app does not allow modifying the income statement, so if data is missing, the taxpayer is redirected to the web.

The urgency of many taxpayers who want to receive the refund from the Tax Agency as soon as possible has led many of them to confirm without further ado the draft of the declaration and that is where many taxpayers "are losing money." A few days ago, on the front pages of some newspapers, some representatives and technicians of the Tax Agency were manifesting, stressing the importance of "not confirming the drafts without first reviewing them." These statements, which may seem like a truism, have their relevance when it is detected that the drafts do not include deductions to which taxpayers are entitled. Thus, taxpayers who had applied deductions for a single parent family the previous year, did not have such a deduction reflected in their income statement for this year. In other cases, the same happened with the deduction for habitual residence of taxpayers who had been applying it in previous years and who observed as in this exercise, and despite the Tax Agency having the data of their loans, the deduction for this reason was not reflected in your statement.

Separate mention are those other expenses or investments of which the Tax Agency cannot have data and that, therefore, it cannot include, due to its ignorance, in the income statement. We refer, by way of example, to expenses such as those incurred for domestic help (for example, in Andalusia), childcare expenses for children under 3 years of age (Aragón, Asturias, Canarias, Cantabria, Galicia, Murcia, La Rioja or Comunidad Valenciana), acquisition of textbooks and school supplies (Aragón, Asturias, Illes Balears, Canarias, Castilla La Mancha, Madrid, Murcia or Valencian Community), school canteen or school transport (Canary Islands), school uniforms (Canary Islands or Madrid), expenses for the acquisition or rehabilitation of habitual residence (practically in all the Autonomous Communities) or donations in cash to descendants for the acquisition of habitual residence (for example, in the Canary Islands), rental of habitual residence (in most of the Autonomous Communities) or Medical expenses paid by credit card, income or bank transfer (Canary Islands). There are also other deductions that, in principle, the Tax Agency does not know if we are entitled to them or not, such as deductions for the birth or adoption of children.

Therefore, we must carefully review the tax data held by the Tax Agency because in many cases, most of them, they are incomplete. This statement may seem catastrophic but it is reality. How many taxpayers with children have not bought textbooks or school supplies? How many of us have not had to buy school uniforms? How many taxpayers are not renting or paying a mortgage (in this case there are time limits)? How many have not attended private medical consultations for which they have had to pay a bill? And how many have not incurred several of those expenses?

In the following example, you can check the importance of not just committing drafts without first reviewing them:

A taxpayer residing in the Canary Islands, divorced and with a dependent child, with a gross salary of 28,000 euros, rental expenses of 7,200 euros per year, expenses for the purchase of textbooks, school supplies, uniforms and a school canteen of 1,500 euros and medical expenses paid by credit card amounting to 300 euros, he confirmed his income statement as he had an amount to be returned of 836.29 euros. Days after sending it, after consulting our office, the calculation of what would be returned if you had included all the expenses and deductions that the Tax Agency did not include in your return (in some cases because it was impossible that knew them):

The inclusion of the rental costs entailed a deduction of 500 euros.
School expenses allowed a deduction of 100 euros to be applied.
Medical expenses generated a right to deduct 30 euros.
As a single-parent family, she had the right to deduct 100 euros.
The result of her income statement, including these deductions, gave a result to be returned of 1,566.29 euros, that is, 730 euros more than what she had confirmed.

Luckily, the return can be rectified once it is presented (the Tax Agency allows it to be done through the presentation of a new rectifying declaration) and you can recover that money.

In summary, the conclusion is clear: DO NOT CONFIRM THE DRAFT, as a high percentage of the fiscal data will be incomplete. And if they have, present a corrective statement.