The report on the control exercised by the Tax and Customs Authority (AT) is part of the 2024 report on combating tax and customs fraud and evasion, delivered to parliament last week, under the responsibility of the office of the Secretary of State for Fiscal Affairs, Cláudia Reis Duarte.
When taxpayers submit their annual income tax returns on the Finance Portal, the AT conducts an automatic check for discrepancies to detect disparities in the filled data, concerning worker or pensioner incomes, the amount of IRS already withheld at source, personal data, and values related to tax deductions such as education and health.
In 2024, during the submission of IRS returns for 2023, the AT identified “258,938 discrepancies (4.29% of the total)” among 6,038,497 returns. These discrepancies were identified when the returns were in the “current” state, as stated in the report.
The AT application that performs this type of automatic control “enables swift and effective resolution of situations where the elements declared” by taxpayers “differ from those known by the AT, usually provided by third parties, as evidenced by the reduced number of pending situations on 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 while they are filling out their returns.
“This system is based on cross-referencing information from the AT’s databases, namely the monthly remuneration declarations (DMR), Model 10, Model 44 declarations, among others,” allowing the AT to reduce “settlement timeframes,” prevent “litigation cases,” and control the elements considered in the IRS, as explained in the Government’s report.
Last year, the AT created two new alerts “related to reinvestment and tax benefits”—one for those who want to “benefit from tax exclusion” on the redemption of investment fund participation units and have already benefited from this incentive in the past three years, and another on annex A of the declaration, regarding the tax incentive for purchasing shares in startups.
