The report on controls conducted by the Tax and Customs Authority (AT) is part of the report on combating tax and customs fraud and evasion for 2024, submitted to parliament last week by the office of the Secretary of State for Fiscal Affairs, Cláudia Reis Duarte.
When taxpayers submit their annual income declaration on the Finance Portal, the AT automatically checks for discrepancies to detect disparities in the filled data, such as those related to employee or pension income, IRS withheld at source, personal data, and deduction values (such as education and health).
In 2024, during the submission of IRS declarations for 2023, the AT identified “258,938 discrepancies (4.29% of the total)” among 6,038,497 declarations. The discrepancies were identified when the declarations were in the “valid” state, the report states.
The AT’s application for this type of automatic control “allows for a swift and effective resolution of situations where the declared elements” by taxpayers “differ from those known by the AT, usually provided by third parties, as evidenced by the reduced number of pending situations as of December 31, 2024, which corresponded to 11,761, or 4.54% of the total,” the Government states.
The AT’s website has an alert system that notifies taxpayers when they are filling out their declarations.
“This system is based on the cross-referencing of information in AT’s databases, particularly from monthly remuneration declarations (DMR), Model 10 declarations, Model 44, among others,” allowing AT to reduce “settlement deadlines,” cases of “litigation,” and control the elements considered in the IRS, the Government report explains.
Last year, the AT created two new alerts, “related to reinvestment and tax benefits”—one for those who want to “benefit from the exclusion of taxation” on the redemption of investment fund units and have already benefited from this incentive in the past three years, and another in annex A of the declaration on the tax incentive for purchasing shares in startups.”
