Taking and keeping

I've complained before about our occasional tussles with "authority" here in Spain and how it's quite tricky to complain or fight back. It's not just the language. Some of the processes can be a bit Kafka, a bit Catch 22.

You may remember that the tax people questioned my 2014 tax returns. It cost me 118€ to defend myself, not a lot but 118€ that I could have invested much more wisely in, for instance,  throwing the money in the dust and trampling on it. Their final response after a couple of months was "we will take no further action". They didn't say "whoops" or "sorry" or "here are your expenses" and I rather suspect that we will go through the same rigmarole for my 2015 returns in a few months.

We also had some trouble with the Land Registry, the Catastro. The Land Registry sets the rateable value of houses and this figure is used by the Local Town Hall as a way of fixing the local taxes which, in the end, pay for street lights, parks and gardens and council worker's salaries. An agency called SUMA collects the tax for most of the Town Halls in Alicante province. The Town Halls sets the tax as a percentage of the rateable value. Lets pretend that rate is half a cent on the euro. If your house has a rateable value of 50,000€ then you have to pay 50,000 lots of half a cent or 250€ in local tax.

Our problem was that the Land Registry thought we owned a good percentage of our next door neighbours house. When the Catastro finally sorted this out the rateable value of our house was reduced by about three quarters. Like the tax agency the Land Registry showed no sign of regret when they acknowledged their error. With backdating and what not we have paid this inflated price six times in the last three years.

I expected that, when SUMA sent us our local rates/council tax bill for this year, it would reflect the new, revised, lower Catastro rate and that there would be a refund for those six over payments. But no. The bill was exactly the same amount as last year and they want us to pay the inflated price for a seventh time. I went to talk to the collection agency.

"Ah, well, you see on their last letter the Land Registry say that this rate applies from the day after you receive this letter". I agreed, I'd read that at the time we got the letter, Maggie had read it too, but both of us had failed to grasp the significance. We should have contested the ruling and asked for the corrected rateable value to be backdated to when the error had first been made.

I grasped at straws. "Well the bill for this year should be proportional then," I said. "No, the IBI, the local tax, is due on 1st January for the year and, on that date, the rateable value of your house was the older, higher value".

I'll see if we can fight it of course but I suspect that we are, in the vernacular, buggered. There is something immoral though in a Government Agency recognising that there has been a mistake but not refunding the couple of thousand euros that it has collected under false pretences.

Access denied

I picked up four pieces of post from our PO box in the Post Office today. This is quite unusual. Often there is nothing. Two of the envelopes were from departments of the Spanish Government. One was my European Health Card from the Social Security people. I applied for this, online, last week. I did it as I brushed my teeth getting ready for bed. It took moments, it was easy. The card's only valid for six months but, next time, as a pensioner, it'll be for longer. No problem anyway. I brush my teeth every night.

The other was from the Catastro, the Land Registry. It was an answer to my appeal of February 2017 when they said we owned half of next door and charged us much more IBI, the local housing tax, than we should have paid. A lightning 25 months to respond then. In that time I've sent several emails, been to their Alicante office (where I metaphorically banged on the table) and reported them to the Ombudsman. That's probably why they answered so quickly.

Instead of sending me the notification by post the letter inside the envelope told me how to get to that notification online. To get to the notification I had to "sign" a receipt but, being the 21st century, they wanted a virtual signature. No problem; I have a digital certificate, an electronic signature, on the computer. Up to now that has always been sufficient when dealing with Government Departments. But not today. It took me over three hours to eventually get to the notification. Their systems only worked with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome after several modifications and not at all with Mozilla Firefox. There were links to pages and pages of supporting documentation about how to access the notification along with helpful hints on how to get around potential hiccoughs. I tried downloading the older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer mentioned in that supporting documentation but Windows 10 didn't like them. There were three potential programs to "sign" the receipt. Neither Chrome nor Edge wanted to talk to Java and the Government software, AutoFirma, something like SelfSign stalled in downloading at 99% time after time and the dodgy downloads wouldn't delete. I had to disable pop up blockers (the on/off on Edge wasn't where all the answers in Google said they should be) and I had to dismantle all sorts of other safeguards like firewalls and non acceptance of cookies. I got there in the end, because what I lack in skill I make up for in doggedness, but it was a hell of a job.

To be honest it was so outrageous that I didn't get particularly cross. I was doing that cursing and laughing out loud thing. I remembered the strikes of workers within the justice system asking for computer systems that worked and the piles of paper that you can see behind the judges in the current Catalan trials. Obviously the roll out of technological solutions varies from one department to another. I wonder if Catastro still has ink wells on its desks?

The good news is that they seem to have put everything right in their records. They've even regularised a bit of land that we didn't know wasn't registered. Now all I have to do is to hope that they give us some money back!

A morning in Alicante

The Catastro, the Spanish version of the Land Registry, told me that article 18 of the Legislative Royal Decree of the 5th March 2004 (1/2004) says that any dispute must be attended within six months of receipt. I remember those things from when I used to work. We will acknowledge receipt of your communication within 24 hours and respond within 72 hours. Except that, this time, it was six months.

I have a bit of a conversation cum reading sheet about drinks that I use with my English learners. The drinks sheet starts with tea. It says Britain is a tea drinking nation. It has variations on "A pint of sheepshagger, please" and it mentions how overpriced coffee has Italian, rather than Spanish or French, names. But it starts with the phrase Britain is a tea drinking nation.

Now I have a critic. Every now and then a Spanish bloke, living in the UK, feels incensed enough, on reading my blogs, to put fingers to keyboard and play merry hell. He tells me off for lots of things but he particularly doesn't like my generalisations about the Spanish and he doesn't like my comparisons between the UK and Spain. My argument back to him is that generalisations are a fact of life. My experience is that Britons drink tea, the people on Gogglebox look to have a cuppa in their hand. It's true though that neither my mum nor my pal Geoff drinks tea. The sheet though says that Britain is a tea drinking nation and I think that's fair enough.

As well as the critic my Mexican pal Laura told me off, years ago, for repeatedly harking back to the UK. I tried to stop. I suspect though that the majority of the handful of people who read my blog have a British background. Nowadays though I try to keep my British comparisons to the factual or explanatory. So if I write about the ITV I might say that it's a regular vehicle check similar to the MOT or I might say that the ITV involves a such and such a check, unlike its British counterpart. I often voice an opinion, based on my experience, and draw some sort of conclusion from that observation. For instance I might say that the Spanish Social Security payments for the self employed are almost punitive and so there is a natural tendency for people to avoid paying them if possible.

So back to generalisations and my British opinions about the Catastro. I didn't want to go to their offices. I had the feeling that it was tempting fate. My limited experience of complaining in Spain leads me to believe that it can have unexpected consequences. Sleeping dogs are better left lying. But, after 15 or 16 months of absolute silence from their offices, and despite article 18 of the Legislative Royal Decree of the 5th March 2004 (1/2004), something needed to be done about trying to get back the hundreds of euros we'd been overcharged in paying the property tax on our neighbour's house.

In order to get to speak to someone I had made an appointment. When I got to the office I had to check in. There was a little ticket printing machine to do that. It assigned numbers. I entered my NIE, the ID number issued to foreigners, and the machine said that I had no appointment. The same thing, failure to recognise the correct number, happens relatively often on badly designed websites - the sort that presume everyone has two surnames. The NIE is different in format to the ID number issued to Spaniards, the DNI.  Sometimes, I can get the NIE to be recognised by missing off one or both of the letters that top and tail the seven digit figure. Sometimes adding a zero at the beginning works. But not this time. So I went to the man at the information desk. He ignored me for a while and then he spoke to me as though I were an idiot. He asked the security man to help. The security guard was fine. He checked me off his appointment list and told me that the machine wasn't set up properly to deal with NIEs. He gave me a number and some ten minutes later my number flashed up on the screen telling me to go to desk 4 but I didn't even get to sit down. "Hang on a mo," said the woman, "Yes, you need to go upstairs to room 15. Wait to be called". I sat and waited. I had to go and feed the parking meter before I was called. The 90 minute maximum waiting time wasn't enough.

"The problem is that your land isn't registered, just the buildings." said the man in room 15. It wasn't difficult to recognise that I was being fobbed off. But that bloke on the reception desk had really pissed me off and I wasn't for backing down quite so easily this time. In for a penny in for a pound as it were.  We talked back and forth for quite a long time. Just for once my Spanish didn't fall apart and I stood my ground. I wasn't for giving up on this. If he'd found another problem then we had another problem but what about the original problem, the overcharging? Even if I had land to register they had the buildings registered and some of the buildings we were paying tax on were not ours. And, besides, why hadn't they sent a reply in fifteen months? There didn't appear to be any extra documents added to the stuff that I'd sent them, in fact it looked as though this was the first time that anybody had looked at the file despite my three inquiring emails and despite article 18 of the Legislative Royal Decree of the 5th March 2004 (1/2004). Obviously enough, in the end, he still palmed me off. "It needs a decision from someone higher up the pay scale than me," he said. At least I felt I'd done my best. It's going to cost us more money in the end though.

Don John

My Spanish is odd. I know a fair bit. I can talk alright but sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can get really flustered and cock it up completely. Sometimes I can laugh at my mistakes and plough on or I can get angry and sulky. Language, or problems with language are still, by far, the biggest stumbling block to my day to day dealings with Spain.

In the last post I mentioned that the Consumer Office had suggested the only way to sort out our overpaid local taxes was to go to the nearest office of the Land Registry, the Catastro, 60 kilometres away in Alicante city. Nowadays, with most government offices, you need to arrange a prior appointment. That doesn't mean you don't have to queue but it does mean you'll get served. There are lots of systems for making an appointment online and even the most basic website usually offers some sort of email possibility. Not the Catastro though. You can get access to plenty of information online but sorting an appointment has to be done by phone.

I used to live on the phone when I had a real job but, nowadays, I find phone calls to help lines really difficult irrespective of the language. First there are the technical problems; the headsets not set up properly so that the volume is too loud or too low and the VOIP connections with the corresponding clicks or echoes on the line. Then there are those more physical problems like balancing the phone under your chin whilst you search for the reference number that you didn't expect them to ask for. Now add in the Spanish. If talking to people face to face can vary from ordinary and normal to a bit embarrassing talking to people on the phone, for me, tends towards nightmare. There are non of those corporal cues to help - you can't nod or gesticulate or smile - it all depends on the words that you utter and only on the words.

So, I'd put off phoning the Catastro as long as I could. As I pressed the number buttons on the phone I remembered approaching the end of the 10 metre board at the swimming pool in Skipton when I was a boy. The connection was dodgy - a beep on the line every three seconds or so. I listened to the "Please hold we'll be with you in a moment" message for a while with the knot in my stomach getting tighter and tighter. "How can I help you today?" said a cheery voice in Spanish with a nice clear accent. No niceties on my part I just blurted out "I want to arrange an appointment with the Alicante office" with the Spanish steeped in the broadest of Yorkshire accents. Questions and answers; ID numbers, reference numbers, post codes, phone numbers - easy questions. Then there was a question about why I wanted to speak to them, I fluffed and muttered. The man said "Ya". Ya is a multi-use, often confirmatory, word that can mean lots of things. When he said it he said it in a way that I know well, with the vowel sound lengthened and a click at the end, so that it sounds resigned and world weary. I got the appointment though.

As he confirmed the place, date and time he made the mistake, common amongst Spaniards used to their double barrelled surnames, of thinking that my middle name was my surname. Thank you for your call to the Catastro today Don John. As I sniggered I failed to say "adios" properly. Ending on a low note.

Confused

The Post Office sends me a text message when there is something that needs signing for waiting in our post box. This is often good. If we have an order on the way from Amazon or Decathlon it means it's parcel opening time. But it can be bad too. It's the way that the local police make sure that you have the notification of the parking fine and it's the way the tax office tells you that you've been fiddling your tax and you're in trouble.

The one today was a Model 990 form from the Catastro, the Land Registry. My reading of Spanish isn't too bad. For instance I just knocked off a novel by Carmen Martín Gaite of about 260 pages in under a week with the usual few pages a day workday reading. But official Spanish is something else. The tax man and the local government woman don't see why they should use a common word when there is a long and unknown one available in the thicker versions of the dictionary.

I got the gist though. The Registry said that our house deeds were not up to date and they wanted 60€ for sorting out the paperwork. If we chose to fight them with lawyers we could but, otherwise, cough up in the next fifteen days. I didn't hesitate. I went to a bank in Pinoso and paid.

I've just had a more detailed re-read of the letter. There is a lengthy explanation of each section of the form. It made me snigger and snort as the terminology varies between the explanatory notes and the real form. So on the explanatory notes it may say multiplier - the figure by which we multiply the rateable value of your property to arrive at nominal value but, on the actual form, it says co-efficient of multiplication.

The upshot is plain. The rateable value of the house has increased. The local taxes we pay are based on that nominal value of the house. If the supposed value of the house increases then our tax burden increases with it. I presume that the next stage will be an arrears demand for the difference between the taxes we have paid and the taxes we should have paid.

You are supposed to get permission from the local town hall to do almost any work on your house. Generally people do this when it's somethng obvious - changing windows - or something that changes the footprint of the house - building an extension for instance. Technically though you are supposed to do it for nearly everything. When I heard someone explaining this on the radio she used the example of replacing the bathroom tiles. Apparently, every time we get any work done on the house, as well as getting permission to do it from the town hall, we are supposed to tell the Land Registry. Whilst people do usually or at least sometimes get the town hall licences I suspect that nobody does the Registry bit and I further suspect that the Government knows this. So they came up with a wheeze of a plan. Rather than actually try to fine everyone they simply regularise the records for a nominal 60€. Almost nobody is going to fight a 60€ charge as it would cost nearly as much to ask a lawyer whether it was worth fighting. So, by getting someone to check town hall licences against catastral records the Government has a nice little earner.