Tax specialists have warned of a growing lack of social support for paying taxes, a phenomenon they relate to the legal uncertainty arising from continuous regulatory changes and the complexity of the system, as well as to administrative burdens that in many cases they consider "disproportionate".
At the XXXVI Congress of State Tax Inspectors, which is being held these days in Toledo, the tax inspector and writer Francisco de la Torre has pointed out that there is a clear public unease about the use of public money, a perception that, as he has recalled, was already present before the tragic rail accident that occurred between Urda and Los Yébenes (Toledo).
De la Torre has detailed that the tax burden stands at close to 38% of GDP and that the tax that generates the most contact between the population and the Tax Agency, IRPF, currently reaches the highest rate recorded to date, 15.1%. "There is unease in how taxes are collected," he has warned, underscoring that this situation undermines confidence in the system.
For his part, the professor of Public Finance at UCLM and former director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IEF), Juan José Rubio Guerrero, has questioned what is being done wrong to fail to make citizens perceive taxes as a key piece for sustaining the Welfare State.
Along those lines, he has recalled that recent studies show that 31% of young people believe they would live better without taxes, compared with 9% of people over 65 who share that opinion, a generational gap that, in his view, evidences a problem of perception and fiscal pedagogy.
Among the measures to reverse this trend, Juan José Rubio Guerrero has advocated strengthening transparency and boosting tax education, with special attention to younger generations. "The rights and levels have to be explained, not only the obligations, the economic and social role of taxes has to be shown," he has emphasized, defending that only in this way will it be possible to improve acceptance of the system.
Implications of budget extensions
During the same day, Francisco de la Torre has warned that, after a full legislature without new General State Budgets, the successive "patches" of the Government have caused there to be no "human way" to know clearly the destination of public revenues. This opacity, he indicated, also affects the tax administration itself and ends up transferring taxpayers' displeasure to "whoever takes the blame", that is, to the tax inspectors.
In similar terms has spoken the former president of the Court of Auditors, María José de la Fuente y de la Calle, who has pointed out that the continued extension of the budgets generates important difficulties for the correct allocation of resources both in the General State Administration and in the Tax Administrations.
Likewise, she has emphasized that increasing spending does not by itself guarantee better public services and has insisted that the objective must be to spend more efficiently, underscoring the relevance of an adequate allocation of public spending to improve results and citizens' perception of the use of taxes.