The low corporate income tax revenue

The data is quite significant: 60% of Spanish companies have declared losses to the Treasury. These data related to the income tax of 2011, revealed that more than half a million companies presented a positive income statements, from a total of nearly 1.4 million companies in Spain. The figures have come to light following the issuance of a report by the Tax Office, which is extracted from another alarming fact: big companies in the country paid, in respect of income tax for the last year, a figure close to 5 % of its profits, on the other hand, SMEs paid an average 15% on their positive results.

The reality is that SMEs pay more tax on their profits than large business groups and multinationals, which have mechanisms at their disposal to reduce tax costs. An example of this practice is found in the taxation of consolidated groups of companies: after the application for exemption, adjustments and other incentives or tax benefits, the tax basis of the Spanish groups in 2011 were taxed at a rate of about 5%. This special scheme is applied for example by Ibex mostly. One of the defenses of these companies is to claim as exempt some results that has already been taxed in other countries to repatriate dividends. Thus, the effective rate of taxation would be higher.

However, many sectors are that it is too permissive with large business groups. In fact, in recent months there have been several changes aimed at big business: the rise of partial payments on account of tax, limiting interest deduction or elimination of accelerated depreciation. Even with such modifications as the collection in 2013 for corporation tax will fall nearly 3% ...