Friday, March 29

The unions ask the Treasury to evict the Tax Agency with public housing at a bargain price


UGT, CCOO and the Independent Union of the Tax Agency (SIAT), the three majority union organizations in that body, have asked the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, to vacate the homes that dozens of positions of the State Administration Agency Tributaria (AEAT) occupy in exchange for rents well below their market price.

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This is a situation recently revealed by elDiario.es and that the three unions describe, in a letter to the minister, as an “occupation” and an “abuse of power” in exchange for a “ridiculous” monthly rent. “We trust your ethical commitment to put an end to this practice that we understand is unpresentable,” says the letter to which this medium has had access. The three organizations, “as representatives of the social majority in the AEAT”, express to the minister “the indignation that the Tax Agency workers convey to us in relation to the homes occupied by various territorial managers of this body, as well as the reserve of exclusive use of parking spaces for said managers and members of their families”.

“Various media outlets have echoed this existing malaise among the 25,000 professionals, who attend stunned and powerless at what they understand to be an abuse of power: public employees with salaries of more than €100,000 who enjoy real estate located in the best areas of certain cities in our country in exchange for a ridiculous remuneration in kind whose real cost for the beneficiary would barely reach 350 euros/month, while the rest of the workers have to pay for their homes and their supplies (electricity, water, etc)”.

The letter also informs Montero that the documentation on “this misunderstood occupation will be sent to the different parliamentary groups.” Asked about this matter, the Ministry has declined to comment.

The unions recall in the letter that “on several occasions” they have sent letters and “verbally requested the AEAT management to put an end to this practice that we understand is inappropriate for a reference body in the public administrations of our country.”

“On November 30, we sent a letter to the Transparency portal requesting information on the conditions of use of said properties, obtaining an unsatisfactory response from said body based on a report prepared by the AEAT itself,” they recall.

32 properties

As the AEAT recently acknowledged to this medium in an email, in February 2022 there were “32 properties occupied” by these officials, who are not senior officials and whose profile “is diverse”. Of those 32 buildings (in December there were 34), five were occupied by special delegates and twelve, by provincial delegates, according to the AEAT. Another fifteen houses were “occupied by administrators, responsible for Customs and Customs Surveillance, doormen…”.



Therefore, almost a third of the agency’s special delegates (there is one for each autonomous community) would be in that situation. In general, Treasury inspectors whose remuneration can comfortably exceed 100,000 euros gross per year, more than the President of the Government or any minister. In many cases, these are the highest paid officials in the province.

These houses, located in AEAT facilities, have an average size of 186.48 square meters. “The maximum area is 423 m2 and the minimum is 40 m2,” according to the agency, which did not specify its location.

According to a list prepared by the unions themselves, among the buildings occupied by positions of the body at the end of 2021 there were none in the two great Spanish capitals, Madrid and Barcelona. But yes, in AEAT offices in very relevant cities such as A Coruña, Alicante, Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Donostia, Granada, Palma or Vigo.

And those officials occupy them for such low rents because the personal income tax law stipulates that free enjoyment or for a price lower than the market price of a property for private purposes is an income in kind that is valued by a percentage of 5% or 10 % of the cadastral value of the home, depending on whether or not the municipality of residence has reviewed these values ​​in the last decade.

But the valuation applied cannot exceed 10% of the worker’s annual compensation. And for a delegate with an annual salary of 100,000 euros, the maximum valuation of the property would be 10% of that amount, 10,000 euros, so the cost for him would be the marginal rate of personal income tax. Assuming a rate of 45%, it would be 4,500 euros, which is 375 per month for homes whose real market value for rental would be several thousand euros.

One of the most commented cases in the agency is that of Arnaldo Cañellas, special delegate of the AEAT in Palma for ten years. This senior official, recognizes the AEAT, resides in the house located in the delegation, a mansion in the Balearic capital. At the same time he has in his name, among other properties on the island, and according to the information available in the Property Registry, two large homes in the center of Palma, a nine-minute walk from the delegation.

The workers’ representatives also recall the more than 48,000 euros that it has allocated the special delegate in A Coruña, Imelda Capote, to repair the roof of the huge penthouse where she lives, on the eighth floor of the building that houses the Delegation, opposite Riazor beach.

Another controversial aspect is the parking spaces in the agency’s premises. According to the three unions, in addition to occupying these buildings with their families, these and other officials of the organization also enjoy more than fifty places for private use (some of them, they point out, as a storage room), a situation that the union organizations analyze in view of the possible filing of a complaint for alleged improper use of public property.

The AEAT, which is renting office space in some of the cities where it has leased homes to its charges, points out that there has been “a significant reduction” in the number of State homes occupied by its staff: “More than 20 %” from September 2018 to February this year.

In the absence of a regulation that regulates this practice, the entity approved an internal regulation in 2020 “to set criteria that would guide decisions on occupation and use of housing.” In general, they will be “spaces to be allocated, in the future, to administrative uses”, except in Ceuta, Melilla, Algeciras and the five Canary Islands that are not delegation headquarters, to “facilitate the acceptance of destination in these territories” by part of the officials.



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