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.

Sweet and sour

The Spanish tax year runs from 1st January to 31st December. Sometime around the end of March, or the beginning of April, the tax process begins and people have till June to either put in their claims for reimbursements or pay up what they owe. I still do a bit of part time work and I have some income from a Teacher's Pension so I have tax to pay. For years I did my own tax return by either going to the local tax office or doing it online.

A few years ago it all got a bit more complicated because there were rule changes about the taxation of overseas pension income. Well that and that I'd been evading tax just a little. HM Revenue and Customs dobbed me in to the Spaniards and told them about the 300€ or so I get each year from a tiny AVC pension fund. Pedro, a nice accountant in Molina de Segura sorted it all out for me and I stuck with him the next tax year too. Last year though I went back to doing it myself and ended up with a tax bill of about 1,200€ which was a bit of a shock. That amount represents a bit below four months pay from my very part time. It didn't seem fair or right but, after lots of Googling and questions on expat forums, the evidence suggested it was as it should be. So I gritted my teeth and paid up.

This year I added my pension to the draft tax return form online again and it looked as though I owed around 400€. I decided to ask an accountant, just to be sure. My appointment was this morning. All the sums done the accountant told me the tax people owed me about 50€. This is a good result. It turns out that accountants can do something on the tax returns that private individuals can't so, by not going to an accountant last year, I had doomed myself to overpaying my taxes. I'm taking a positive view of this and being thankful. I am not going to cry over last years spilled milk. There's the sweet.

In February of 2017 we got a huge "rates" demand. Well huge by our standards. Another five months of part time work's worth. With a bit of checking it turned out that there was an error. We are paying the rates for most of our neighbours house!

I put in an appeal with the Land Registry, the Catastro, and waited for something to happen. After about five months I sent an email asking, very politely, if they had any news. They told me they had, by law, up to six months to reply. I asked again after nine months and they told me that the matter was "under consideration". It's now around 15 months and their recent reply was also to wait. Taking on the Land Registry in hand to hand combat is not something I relish. So I booked in for an appointment with the local Consumer Protection Office to see if they could do anything on our behalf. My appointment was this afternoon. Their advice was to go to the Land Registry Office in Alicante and make my case face to face. Not exactly the sort of help I was looking for. Perhaps the most depressing thing was that the chap who suggested this also gave me the address for the local ombudsman rather suggesting that he's not hopeful about the outcome. And that's the sour.

Plans and plots

A while ago we got something from the Catastro, or Land Registry, saying that we needed to stump up 60€ to have our entry in the land registry updated. I did a fair bit of research at the time to find out what was happening and why. I came to the conclusion that the Catastro was doing two things at once - updating the rateable value of houses and checking that their details for each house were correct. If there was any discrepancy between their records and the actual state of the property they were systematically fining people a standard 60€ for regularising their records throughout Spain. I read somewhere that, in Pinoso, about 1,000 households had been charged the 60€. Considering that there are fewer than 8,000 people in Pinoso and presuming that more than one person lives in most houses it sounded as though a good percentage of the records were skew whiff in some way.

The system here is a lot like the old British Rates system. Each property has an assigned value calculated on the sort of land it occupies, what use the buildings or land are put to and the area it occupies. Basically then the Catastro says your property has such and such a value - a value that bears no relation whatsoever to the market value. Each local authority then sets a local multiplier. To give a completely fictitious example a 100 square metre house might have a notional value with the Land registry of 50,000€. The local council then sets its charge at, for instance, 0.5% of the value. In this case the rates would be 250€ per year. The last time our rateable value was updated was, I think, in 1987 so I expected a bill, a settling up.

Maggie picked up the new valuation and the updated bill from the Post Office the other day. It wasn't for a few euros extra it was for 1600 of the little blighters. It would take me about nine weeks work to earn that amount. By the time I got home Maggie had been investigating. She had been pretty sleuthlike and she'd discovered that, when they had updated our details, the Catastro had added in most of next door. So although it was bad we did, at least, have an obvious error. Well it's obvious to us and we just have to hope it's as obvious to the people at the Catastro.

Local taxes are collected, in most of Alicante, by an agency called SUMA on behalf of the local authorities. I went to the SUMA offices in Elda, about 25km from home, to see what I could do. The woman who dealt with me was pleasant, efficient and helpful. She told me that the bill had to be paid otherwise we'd find the bailiffs on our doormat or that our bank accounts had been embargoed. I asked if I could break the payment down into instalments and the answer was yes. She quickly sorted out the details. The good news is that, provided the Land Registry agrees that we are paying more than we should, they will pay us back. I asked the SUMA woman how long Catastro normally take to respond - well months, usually, she said, sometimes years - they're not quick.

And the process? Well, basically I needed to collect together a bunch of documents and write an explanatory begging letter. Literally. I used a verb at the end of the letter which is rogar a verb which translates as to beg or to plead. I used it because it's the sort of verb that I've seen in this sort of letter. Spanish letters from local and national government tend to an over complex and archaic language. I asked my friend Carlos, the author, to check the letter I had written and he didn't comment on the verb. I asked a work colleague to check the letter, she didn't comment on the verb. To beg, to plead is obviously an adequate verb when talking to the Catastro.

Today I handed in all the paperwork. The man I dealt with was a bit negative when I started, maybe he wasn't keen on dealing with another tongue tied Brit, but by the time I was getting ready to go he seemed to think it was a pretty simple and fixable error. Let's hope he's right and that it doesn't take months and months to get a reply.