Let justice be done

I don't usually know what your average Spaniard is talking about as they chat with the neighbours, keys in hand outside their house or have a drink after work in the bar. It's easy enough for me to ask real Spanish people real questions but asking for answers isn't the same as knowing what people talk about spontaneously. Of course the traditional media, newspapers, television, radio and the social media probably reflect what's going on in the street but not necessarily so.

There has been one constant in the news for months. Cataluña. Every morning as I do those things that you do in the morning in the bathroom listening to the radio and as I move to the kitchen for my breakfast tea and toast I hear the pundits sounding off about Cataluña. There are lots of other things in and on the news but Cataluña just keeps coming back and back. Maybe they should start to have a section for Cataluña similar to the sports slot or the stock market updates. I have no idea about Cataluña; it's a political quagmire which causes apparently intelligent people to behave like children. I watched a Netflix documentary called Two Catalonias (it  was in a number of languages but the subtitles that held it all together were in Castellano so I suppose that if you watched it in the UK the subs would be in English). Every time someone made a point pro or anti independence the next section would have someone making exactly the opposite point using the same facts or events. I have never seen a documentary like it. I've never heard a debate like it. What seems to be happening is that people choose their viewpoint and then select facts to support that opinion.

But for the past few days Cataluña hasn't got much of a look in. Back in mid October the Supreme Court ruled that a tax on mortgages, called the actos jurídicos documentados, a sort of stamp duty collected by the banks and passed on to the Regional Governments, should be paid by the banks and not by the people taking out the mortgage. The duty varies from region to region; for instance it's twice as high where we live as in Madrid. Looking for an illustrative figure it seems that in Alicante you would pay around  2,250€ on a 150,000€ mortgage. There were lots of arguments about the sums but the loss to the banks was reckoned to be about 5.5 billion euros and it didn't do their share prices any good at all.

The day after the court decision a senior judge provisionally halted the judgement from taking effect and two days after that the top judge in the Supreme Court decided to call all the Supreme Court judges together to decide what to do. In the meantime nobody wanted to sign off on their mortgage and everyone with a mortgage was looking forward to getting money back. The judges meeting, which lasted two days, finished a couple of days ago and their worships decided by 15 votes to 13 to continue the system where the person taking out the mortgage paid the duty and not the banks. The headlines were all along the lines "Banks 15 The People 13" or "The Banks win". The Social Media exploded with indignation and I didn't need to go anywhere other than the supermarket queue to know what the trending topic in the street is today.

Professionalism

It's probably some sort of jingoism on my part but I can't say I'm that impressed by the professionals that we have occasionally used here. By professionals I don't mean doctors or mechanics or plumbers or builders. They seem fine or at least just normally inept. No, I'm talking about the sort of people who work from offices and should wear suits - architects, lawyers, accountants, bank workers and the like.

A friend of ours was going through a divorce. The lawyer forgot to tell her that the divorce had been granted. Right on the ball then?

When we first got here we hired a lawyer to sort out our residence papers. We thought we could do it ourselves but to avoid hassle we paid a professional. Unfortunately the lawyer was completely unaware that the legislation was changing. He went through the tried and tested process but, by the time we went to collect the documentation, it no longer existed. We'd paid upfront. There was no talk of a refund. We did the correct paperwork ourselves.

As a part of some half hearted anti money laundering legislation everyone has to prove that they are who they say they are to their bank. This has to be done in person at a branch. The legislation was introduced in October 2010 leaving over four years for the banks to collect the information. In the last few weeks the banks have been in some sort of blue funk trying to get an extension on the implementation date at the end of April. They seemed to have forgotten to tell anyone. I read it in the press. This really is leaving your weekend homework to the school bus on Monday morning.

Last year the tax office caught up with some untaxed pension income of mine. I went to the Revenue to sort it out with my annual declaration. I wanted to correct any underpayment in previous years too but the Tax Office said that was a job for an accountant. I'd gone directly to the Tax Office because I reckoned that if they made a mistake at least it would be an "official" mistake. Anyway, following their advice I went to an accountant in the town where I was living. He told me there was no past tax liability - I was in the clear. The man did not fill me with confidence though. He used a calculator for the simplest of sums, He made lots of ooh and aah sounds as he stared at his computer screen. He kept reaching for his fags before remembering that it's no longer legal to smoke at work. He wasn't Cockburn's Port.

This year I have to have an accountant as I am self employed. The first thing my accountant did on my behalf was to register me as self employed. I knew it had happened because the Social Security confirmed it in a text message and took money from my bank account. They took 40% more than the accountant told me they would take. I heard nothing from the accountant though, not a dickie bird. When I went to see him a month or so ago I asked for the self employment registration certificate. "Oh, haven't we sent it you?," he said. 

The tax people don't seem to have forgotten that I get a UK pension. They sent me a letter offering an amnesty on any unpaid taxes on pension income to foreigners like me - no interest, no fines, just the normal payment of any unpaid back tax. My new accountant didn't seem to want to see the letter that the Tax People had sent even though I said that it talked about a new process, a special form. Unlike last year's accountant my new accountant is sure I owe the Revenue something.

Today, when I sent a WhatsApp to ask him when I might see the paperwork that they were going to submit on my behalf  he replied by phone. I've told him that I try to avoid technical phone calls in Spanish preferring emails or other written options. He told me there was a specific form that had to be completed in my case. The Tax Office need to send the form to me so that in turn I can send it on to the accountant. I presume this is the special form mentioned in the letter that he didn't want to read. Before he rang off he said he just wanted to be sure that he had my correct postal address. It was perfect except for the street, the PO box and the town.

He thinks we should leave the submission till the last possible day. That sounds like the perfect strategy to me.

Evading tax

I got a letter from the tax people yesterday. Now letters from the tax people are not written in normal, everyday Spanish. They are Brontesque in style. With the envelope ripped open and the single page scanned it looked bad. There were lots of words I didn't understand but it was clear that the Revenue, Hacienda, were unhappy about the tax I'd paid on my pension. Tax people can be nasty. Tax people take your house and send you to prison when you're naughty. Unless of course you are very, very rich in which case they are extremely nice to you.

I explained my situation last year in a post on Life in La Unión Just a quick recap. Normally, if you are a Spanish resident, your worldwide income is taxed in Spain. However, I have a local government pension from the UK and there is an agreement between Spain and the UK that government pensions are taxed at source, in the UK. So far so good but where I turn into Al Capone is about my additional voluntary contributions. They provide an additional pension of about forty quid a month. Rather than declare that cash in Spain I simply left it in the UK tax regime. I shouldn't have done. I should have declared it in Spain.

The financial year in Spain is the calendar year. Sometime early in the year, March I think, Hacidenda do their sums and decide whether you owe them money or they owe you money. In 2014, for the tax year 2013, they caught up with me. I came clean and paid the unpaid tax. It was about 70€. The tax office said that to sort out the same underpayment for 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 I'd have to go to an accountant. So I did. I just chose an asesor at random in the town where I was living, La Unión and asked for advice. To be honest the accountant didn't exude reliability but he told me that I earned so little in total that it was all straightforward and I didn't need to do anything. No fines, no clink and no public humiliationn coming my way.

So when I got that letter I started to curse the accountant and think bad thoughts about the man from the Prudential who sold me those worthless AVCs too. Ten minutes later though with a more careful reading of the letter, and only needing to look up two words as it turned out, I realised that the tax people were actually offering an amnesty to we foreigners who hadn't paid up on our pensions. They mentioned the special circumstances we are under i.e. we don't understand the lingo or the culture and we have no idea what's going on. We have till June to sort it out.

Now I have an accountant because I am technically self employed. I phoned him. No worry he said. If it wasn't sent registered post it isn't dangerous. We can talk about it when we next meet.

Thinking about it this letter is actually good. It's a general letter. The accountant in La Unión could be right and it could be that I owe no tax. It could also be that the accountant in La Unión was wrong and I do owe some tax. However, with the amnesty there will be no fine and no interest to pay so the worst it could be is four times the amount I handed over last year or thereabouts. But the best thing is that Hacienda has a process for sorting this out and once I've filled in the appropriate forms and paid any debts it will all be nice and starightforward.

And I do value a quiet life now I'm in my dotage.

Nothing in particular

It's raining. It's rained quite a lot in the last couple of weeks. We've forgotten all about the drought which lasted from last winter through to a few weeks ago. Usually, though not today, it rains overnight which is very civilised. I can't pretend that it's warm but it isn't cold either - at least not outside. Generally we're into the mid to high teens during the day but with sun and blue skies so it feels pleasantly warm. Overnight we're down at 7ºC or 8ºC maybe. I expect it will turn cold in December, it usually does. The pile of leaves that have just started to clog our drive suggest that Autumn has finally arrived. And its getting dark just after six in the afternoon. Considering it will start to get lighter again just before Christmas that's not too bad. So outside, in the fresh air everything is as it should be. Inside the house of course it's miserable. On the front page of today's Alicante paper there's a headline which says that nearly half of the houses in Alicante province lack any form of insulation against sound, heat or cold. This statistical information is tied in to the introduction of energy efficiency certificates for dwellings a while ago. In our house the little windows, designed to keep out the beating sun of summer make our rooms dismal in winter and the uninsulated house with tiled floors, painted walls and badly fitting doors make it exactly the opposite of cosy. With the log burner alight the living room has been lovely and warm but all the adjoining rooms have a cold, musty feel. Getting into bed is quite unpleasant until you stop shivering.

In the news, corruption stories are everywhere. The health minister resigned this week. She was mentioned by a judge as being the direct recipient of goods bought with her husband's dodgy money. I heard lots of comments that it was like making the poor thing resign for having eaten poached game when she didn't know it was poached. Hmm. The same judge said the ruling PP or Conservative party had benefitted directly from dodgy funding but the health minister's boss, the national president, forgot about that when he stood up in parliament and said that corruption was not endemic. The last three PP party treasurers have all been in court, one is on remand and that one has accused the current president of taking illegal payments. I wouldn't like to give the idea that only the PP have their fingers in the till. Certainly on percentages they come out top but, down in Andalucia, there's a huge corruption deal about suspect redundancy notices which implicates two past PSOE or Socialist party presidents. And the independents don't want to miss out either. In Cataluña an almost mythical ex leader turns out to have a stash in Andorra and there was a case of illegal party funding a while ago that another key political figure somehow seemed to sidestep.

Back to our national president; he's a very strange president. Earlier this month a couple of million Catalans turned out for an illegal referendum on independence - the national president generally ignored that and sent something akin to the Crown Prosecution Service (if it's still called that) after the regional president for running an illegal poll. So much easier than arranging to talk about it. He's behaving the way I do when I need to talk to someone in Spanish on the phone. Anything to avoid a difficult conversation.

There are close on 2000 politicians currently charged with some level of corruption yet none of the promised anti corruption legislation has got past the committee stage. The politicians don't go easily either. None of them behave like people convicted of crimes. No sackcloth and ashes. Most of them spin out the process for ever with iffy legal arguments and expensive lawyers. The few who have been locked up argue about which prison they'd like. An ex president of one of the regions was in the sort of prison regime where you go home for the weekends and only put on your stripey suit every now and again. When people found out they got a bit indignant so a judge decided to withdraw those privileges. The ex politician appealed the decision. Another ex regional president who has been sentenced to four years in chokey still has body guards and an official looking car and has been asking the Central Government for a pardon - a real live get out of gaol for free card.

Yesterday I got a text message from the General Treasury of the Social Security on my phone to tell me that my petition to become a self employed person had been approved. In the past I've complained about the difficulties that people face who want to set up their own business here. People needed to have a hefty amount of cash behind them in the bank or at least some heavyweight backers willing to cough up if the business went pear shaped. Social security payments were high too with even the smallest business subject to a 260€ minimum payment from the first day of trading and before any tax committment. Anyway, for my new job, my new boss suggested that I should be self employed. This only made sense because now there is a sort of reduced charge sliding scale social security payment scheme starting at around 53€ for the first 6 months and then going 130€, 180€ and finally 260€ after two years. I thought it sounded like a good scheme. An incentive to get people to register and run legal businesses from the start rather than to start illegally and register only when the profits justified it. Nonetheless in my case I thought it sounded a bit flaky and there were plenty of disadvantages as well as advantages but the accountant told me that at least it was all legit. He did all the work. All I had to do was to sign on the dole and hand over some basic ID documentation and he did the rest. Then a text message. Nearly as strange as our president.

Badly informed - as usual

People tell me I complain. I usually think I am commenting or, more often, guffawing, at the preposterousness of whatever it may be. For instance in Of no fixed address

Anyway, as usual, I was wrong. Just ask Maggie. Always wrong. My address wasn't the real problem. True I had to go to Elda about 25 kilometres away where I was sent from one office to a second but once I was in the right place it took only a few seconds to change my address with the Social Security, with the Health people.

Back at the computer I applied for my European Health Card only to have the application turned down again. So I rang the helpline. I enjoyed the music and the mix of information and encouragement to not go away as the minutes ticked away.

The woman told me that I'm not employed, I'm not a pensioner and I'm not unemployed so I can't have a card. I explained that I have a job. She couldn't find me on the system and it took a while before she did. Ah, your contract ended at the end of June she said. Well, yes and no I replied. I have one of these fixed discontinuous contracts so I presume that although I'm not being paid I am considered to be employed. Not quite apparently. I have the right to claim unemployment pay and I would not be added to the unemployment statistics but unless I actually claim the dole I have no right to a health card. I checked that there was no problem with ordinary health care here in Spain and that was fine. I can get sick at home but not whilst I gad about Europe.

These contratos fijos discontinuos are designed for people who work in seasonal businesses. The job is yours when there's work but apparently the idea is that you go and draw the dole when the firm doesn't need you. Despite being entitled to unemployment pay people on these contracts are not registered as unemployed. A very odd situation and very easy for the firms to abuse I would have thought. Employ someone for eleven months until the summer holiday period, kick them loose with no need to pay them whilst they draw the dole and then take them on again when they have a nice tan. The other side is that people who have these contracts are unlikely to do much job hunting whilst they are temporarily out of work so they are a dead weight on the public purse. Apparently most of us on these contracts are women and lots of us work in food production, education and tourism.

Obviously my personal situation is a little strange. I'm sure that my boss would keep me working over the summer if I wanted to work. The truth is that it suits me and him for me to take a couple of months off. I avoid work and he doesn't have to employ somebody at a slacker time of the year. It has never crossed my mind to claim the dole.

I'd just better not get sick when we cross the border into Portugal over the summer.

Desestimado

I quite approve of taxes. We all pay in, we all get more out. I know it's not a popular view.

Our local taxes in Spain are based on services, at least some of them are, so much for water, so much for rubbish collection etc. So the system isn't for the general good it's a specific charge. Back in December we got a bill for drainage but we don't have drainage so I appealed the charge. I didn't get a reply so, being away from work and having time we drove the 25kms to the tax collection office to ask what was happening about the appeal. Whilst we were there I also wanted to get a digital certificate to allow me to access the Virtual Offices of several quasi governmental organisations.

No chance with the certificate said the woman, no Internet today. Go to the Town Hall to get one. And the drains, we still haven't got a reply? She dug around in her computer, ah, yes, appeal denied. I was a bit cross not because of the charge so much but because of the woman's blasé attitude in an office where the customer service is usually good. I think I was caustic, the Spanish certainly seemed to flow, if not my body language made the message clear anyway.

We went to the Town Hall. The digital certificate woman was friendly, informative and efficient, ten minutes from start to finish. Now I wonder if it will work?

Benjamin Franklin again

A couple of years ago the local weekly newspaper - El Canfali - disappeared from the newsagents. One of the first victims of the hard financial  times I suppose. El Cabeço, the erstwhile monthly magazine produced by Pinoso Town Hall went missing after February 2010 and only two editions have been printed since then so my news and information resources rather dried up. It's true that there are Internet sources but I don't find them as accessible. Grey hair related I suppose.

Culebrón is a part of Pinoso and Pinoso was a very rich town. The huge local marble quarry provided 85% of the Town Hall's total income. Stone extraction and the secondary industries associated with it were also a major source of employment. The local politicians found themselves in the perfect position. They had money rolling in and no need to upset the voters by raising money through taxation. No wonder we had some splendid facilities.

The marble quarry has been hit hard by the collapse of the building boom Worldwide. The money tap was turned off and lots of people lost their jobs.

By all accounts it took the local politicians a long time to come to terms with the idea of making cuts in local services or increasing their income through increased taxation. The debt piled up. It was about that time that my information sources went South too. Reliable information was replaced by gossipy stories passed around the expat network.

I knew there were going to be local tax increases but I wasn't sure at what sort of percentages. I still don't but I did get my first round of local tax bills today. The car tax was still a very reasonable 50€ but the rubbish collection charge has shot up by about 70% and our water was nearly five times more costly than the same bill last year. Mind you the water is on a metered supply so it could be estimated bills catching up with us or that we've been thirstier and cleaner over the last few months.

Nonetheless the annual car tax, annual rubbish collection and six month water bill still all came in below 250€. The same bill back in the UK would have had me whooping for joy.

I declare

I've just done my tax return. It didn't take me long. The tax people, usually referred to as Hacienda, send me a document through the post that says what they think I owe them or what they think they owe me. If I agree all I have to do is go to their webpage and confirm the details and that's it done for another year.

If I hadn't agreed then I could have changed the details online and confirmed those. I presume that, after a change, some tax clerk or maybe a computer programme, checks the changes and, if they seem reasonable, the confirmed but altered details are given the OK and processed.

The first year I had to do this I went to a local accountant who charged me a few euros, 30€ as I remember, to complete the original form and get me into the tax system. Once I existed on the Hacienda database they began to log any salary and tax payments made by my employers or by the state unemployment people so that they could calculate whether I had over or under paid at the end of the tax year. The tax year is the calendar year.

It doesn't have to be done online. Accountants can deal with the paperwork as can the local tax offices and I think that banks can too. It's obviously more difficult for someone with a business or with multiple income streams but for someone with finances as simple as mine it's dead easy.

Maggie got notification that her draft was available online via a text message to her mobile phone which included the reference number to give her access to the online draft.

Best of all they reckoned they owed me a few euros.