The president of the National Association of Local Public Finance Inspectors (Anihpl), Arturo Delgado, has called for a broad State agreement among the main political forces to undertake an in-depth reform of municipal taxation that puts an end, as he has pointed out, "to the regulatory abandonment and the growing legal uncertainty that aggravates citizens' distrust and detachment towards public administrations".
The demand has been formulated in the run-up to the XXVI Annual Congress of Anihpl, inaugurated this morning in A Coruña by the Councilor for Economy and Strategic Planning and first deputy mayor, José Manuel Lage. In this forum, nearly 150 local finance inspectors and technicians from all over the country are meeting these days to examine the main challenges facing local taxation today.
For the Association, fiscal policy at the local level constitutes one of the essential pillars of any advanced democracy and cannot continue to be managed from improvisation or with a short-term perspective.
For this reason, Anihpl demands "clear, stable and technically sound rules that provide security and avoid chaos, as has happened with the waste fee, around which a debate table will be held tomorrow".
The organization emphasizes that it is impossible to sustain essential public services without a solid revenue base, and warns of the critical and serious situation currently faced by local treasuries, which are the administrations closest to taxpayers.
In this vein, the Association insists that it is necessary to overcome a conception that treats local entities as if they were second-class administrations.
Anihpl argues that Spain needs a deep reflection on the model of local administration and on the legal and tax framework that governs city councils and provincial councils, with the aim of ensuring a regulation that allows optimizing public management and strengthening citizen trust.
Likewise, it warns that the continuous chain of partial regulatory reforms is increasing legal uncertainty around municipal taxes and diminishing the planning capacity of administrations. In its opinion, structural and stable agreements are needed to provide predictability and solidity to the system.