Portugal’s tax department is encouraging taxpayers to add their Fiscal numbers (NIF) to receipts in the new monthly ‘Fatura da Sorte’ lottery so that it can draw up taxpayer profiles and monitor expenditure against an individual's declared income, confirmed Vasco Guimares of the Associação Sindical dos Profissionais da Inspeção Tributaria e Aduaneira (Professional Association of Tax and Customs Inspectors.)
"What the Tax Authority wants is another tool for monitoring people’s expenditure against their declared income," said Guimares at a seminar titled "The unregistered economy and organized crime" held in Lisbon.
Vasco Guimares said that logging expenditure from the number and amount of invoices registered on Finança’s website by taxpayers, may show that someone's spending is higher than his reported income and could then be used as evidence of fraud by the tax authorities in an investigation. If my consumption exceeds my income, I have a technical problem in taxation terms. "
"There are two objectives that the IRS has, an educational one for people to get in the habit of registering their numbers when buying something, and a systems management one so the Tax Authority can build up a consumption profile of taxpayers," said Guimares.
The director of the Centre for Economics and Fraud Management, Carlos Pimenta, said he expected the new lottery to have little affect, saying that things have come to pretty pass when taxpayers have to be bribed with prizes to comply.
The president of the Court of Auditors, Oliveira Martins, considered it a ‘fundamental role’ of the taxpayer to prevent corruption, "unless we have the citizens’ collaboration we will never get the evidence needed to counter these (evasion) problems. Without the active contribution of taxpayers there will be no improvements."
Oliveira Martins said that in the past few years the parallel economy has increased by six percentage points to about 26%, which he considered worrying.
If an individual is under-declaring his income it would be foolish to start submitting a large number of high invoices in the new lottery in the hope of winning a car. Anyone winning a vehicle in the monthly draw also can expect their tax returns and expenditure to be scrutinised before the keys are handed over.
