The Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, has advanced that the Government will shortly modify form 720 for the declaration of assets abroad declared illegal this Thursday by the Court of Justice of the European Union and has recalled that it is still in force.
At a press conference to present the tax collection data, Montero has assured that the intention of the Executive is to approve the modification of the norm before the deadline for submitting this exercise, on March 31, and that for this purpose one of the laws currently in process will be used. “We believe that it is more appropriate to do it through this mechanism than through the mechanism of the decree law,” said Montero.
“We are going to reformulate quickly, once we carefully read the small print, those aspects that need to be corrected”, assured the minister, although she has remarked that the Executive will make a “calm and calm” reading of it. Specifically, the issues that are subject to review are the statute of limitations and the amount of penalties.
In this sense, the minister recalled that the CJEU has not declared the entire model illegal, but only some aspects -fundamentally, the limitation period and the amount of the sanctions-, which are the ones that are now going to be modified. For this reason, he stressed that it is an informative statement, so the model is still valid. So, until March 31 of the current fiscal year, taxpayers have a deadline to file this form 720.
A collection of 225,000 million
As general information, the minister has pointed out that they are some 60,000 taxpayers those who present this model annually, so it is a limited volume of people who make this declaration of goods abroad. The amount in terms of euros declared since the validity of the model is around 225,200 million.
The minister pointed out that practically no sanctions have been imposed in the last three years on this model precisely so as not to have to attend to the possible annulment of the same by the deliberation of the CJEU.
Of course, before these three years sanctions have been imposed for this regulation -created in 2012-, which could reach €230 million. “Now we will have to see who is affected by the small print of the sentence, if it is all those affected or if only a part,” he said.
The Court of Justice of the European Union has declared illegal the Spanish legislation that obliges residents to declare assets and rights abroad through the so-called “model 720” on the grounds that the sanctions and fines it imposes are “disproportionate” and undermine the free movement of capital in the European Union.
The European court has thus agreed with the European Commission, which in 2019 appealed to the community courts after asking Spain to unsuccessfully modify legislation that, in its opinion, imposes “disproportionate” sanctions on those who do not make the declaration or present it out of time.
Historical ruling: the European Justice knocks down the declaration of assets abroad
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