The agreement signed by ERC with the PSC last summer to place Salvador Illa at the head of the Generalitat draws a gradual transfer of taxes to Catalonia remains to be defined by the two levels of government. The text established as a starting point the transfer of 100% of the collection of personal income tax in 2025 and opened the door for this territory to assume the rest, which is why some academics began to to researchWhat place would it have in the common system? to which this autonomous community belongs, unlike the Basque Country or Navarre, which have a regional system.
Fedea researchers Xoaquín Fernández Leicega and Santiago Lago Peñasboth from the University of Santiago de Compostela, published a work on Tuesday in which they emphasize that there is no technical obstacle to the transfer of Corporate taxbut they warn against competition between territories that would be generated by opening to this autonomous community the possibility of establishing more favorable conditions for companies approved in its territory. This would result in a business transfer and a possible loss of income for public coffers throughout the territory, depending on how the concert takes place.
“Corporate taxation would not pose the problem of consumption taxes, but there is a broad consensus on the fact that is not a good candidate be decentralized. “Multi-regional companies would find it very easy to locate their profits (the tax base) where the conditions would be the most favorable,” note the two economists. This problem has already been appreciated at the international level, which has led OECD countries to agree on this point. a global minimum rate for large business groups and multinationals of 15% for this concept, a commitment that resulted in a directive that Spain transposed last week with a bill in which it also included prosecutorial reform.
On the contrary, there are obstacles at the regulatory level for VAT transfer and other special taxes since the European Union does not allow differences in the tax rates applied by the different territories in these concepts, which explains that in the Basque Country or Navarre this tax is governed by the criteria established at the national level. “The transfer of individualized fiscal autonomy does not seem possible to the extent that this would lead to interregional diversity of tax rates or to differentiated treatments not authorized by European regulations, beyond the particularities of the outermost regions,” they emphasize.
The first vice-president of the government and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, highlighted in September that the agreement to provide Catalonia with a “single financing model” only specified that the Generalitat would collect 100% of the tax on the income of natural persons in 2026 (which corresponds to the previous year) despite the collection of the vocation of do the same with “the large part” of the rest of the taxesalthough he did not announce a specific time frame for moving these conversations forward and said the transfer would happen gradually over the next few years. “Anything that does not appear in the agreement is neither agreed nor decided, and will have to comply with the rules that we will put in place when we have finished developing and specifying all the extremes that are envisaged there,” a he declared to the media in Cádiz. .
