These days I am suffering from what, for most of the English and tucked himself into his work life is no more than a nuisance annual already used to, but for me it's a new torture: preparing the statement of income. Indeed, when I moved to England have not won enough to have to submit it, so this is the first time I have to do in Spain. I must admit that the tax office makes a great effort to make things easy for the citizen: you prepare drafts of the declaration, you send tax information, even lets you ask for an official appointment will make the statement for you. All this is fine if you settle your tax information put on the agenda FATHER, give the crank and get the amount of money you must pay. If you dare to scratch the surface a bit, making the daring to understand how to calculate those numbers, and dare you to browse the manual 2007 income among its 770 pages contain paragraphs as tight as this:
To ensure the same reduction of the tax burden for all taxpayers with equal status family, whatever their income level, the amount corresponding to the minimum personal and family income does not reduce the tax period to determine the tax base, but becomes part of the base to be taxed at zero rate.As an Englishman would say, clear as mud . After spending a couple of hours I have been able to understand generally how the tax is calculated, experiencing one of my frequent moments of longing for the United Kingdom, where all of the paperwork was vastly simpler than in Spain.
In the UK, for starters, the statement of income (known as tax assesment or, more commonly, tax return) is required to submit far fewer people: unless you win a respectable amount of money, Be independent, or have income or expenses exotic that are outside the withholding system, it is more likely that you free. In the six and a half years I lived in the UK, I did not submit even once.
This is possible because to PAYE withholding system , whereby each month when you retain the full amount of the tranche of income tax you for and if for any reason (some extra income, perhaps) you pay more or less the following month retention is adjusted to compensate.
The tax itself has similarities with English. In the UK there are fewer sections and the top tax rate is lower (40% instead of 43%). One of the English income tax deductions star, home buying, does not exist in the UK (where, however, stamp duty equivalent to excise tax, is much more benign.)
income tax, incidentally, was recently the star of one of the worst political crisis that Gordon Brown is having to weather. A recent reform rearranged segments, harming millions of people with low incomes. The danger of a Labour internal revolt forced the finance minister Alasdair Darling to step back and make changes to soften.
