In recent days, Bizum has become an unexpected protagonist of the tax debate in Spain as a result of the reform on operations communications that financial institutions must send to the Treasury.
Given the confusion generated, the Tax Agency has published an official clarification to clarify what really changes and what does not in the communication of payments made through Bizum.
What the Treasury has had to clarify. The Tax Agency has published an explanatory note to stop the idea that Bizum is going to impose massive control of payments between individuals. As explained in his note, there is no change in the taxation of individual users or in the obligation to declare the daily payments that individual users make through Bizum.
What does change is the information that banks must send to the Treasury about certain payment systems. Bizum becomes explicitly included along with other means such as credit cards, debit cards or other electronic platforms. But this information obligation does not apply in the same way to all users.
The key nuance is who uses Bizum and for what purpose. And that is where the confusion skyrocketed and the private use of the platform was confused with the professional use and supervision of those payments through Bizum.
The reform that caused it all. The origin of the controversy is in the regulatory reform that regulates communications between financial entities and the Tax Agency, recently published in the BOE. This text establishes that banks must report all movements made through electronic payment systems when the recipient is a company or professional.
That is, Bizum is comparable to other common collection methods in economic activity. If a business, a self-employed person or a company receives payments through Bizum, these movements must be fully communicated to the Treasury, just as occurs with card payments. These payments will be included in your accounting books and tax regulations will be applied to them. like any other paymentand the tax entities will communicate the existence of these payments by identifying the bank or payment accounts through which these charges associated with the company are made.
The standard does not introduce a new obligation for businesses, but rather standardizes the treatment of Bizum with other payment systems that were already under that level of control.
What happens to private users?. The Treasury clarification is blunt on this point: individual users are left outside the individualized control of each movement when they use Bizum for day-to-day payments: shared dinners, gifts, money refunds or small payments between friends are not communicated in detail to the Tax Agency.
There is no new threshold, no obligation to declare each transfer, nor automatic monitoring of daily operations between natural persons. In that sense, Bizum continues to work the same as it has until now for the majority of users.
The exemption, however, does not mean carte blanche from a tax point of view. And this is where the second important nuance about the use of Bizum comes in, understood as a payment channel that has already been equated with any other existing payment system.
Bizum is only a payment channel. In a own statementBizum wanted to clarify that the exclusion of individual users from automatic reporting does not eliminate their tax obligations. The platform insists that the payment method (Bizum, in this case) does not change the nature of the income.
Yeah a user charges a rent by Bizum and does not declare it, it is still taxable income. If you receive a donationmust pay taxes in accordance with the corresponding regulations. And if you use Bizum for a hidden economic activity, the Treasury can demand liability in the same way as if the payment had been made in cash or by transfer.
The key is in the concept of payment, not in the payment channel used. Bizum does not inspect or exonerate itself, it simply channels payments. The obligation to declare depends on the origin and purpose of the money.
SMEs and microenterprises. By equating Bizum with other payment systems and differentiating between individual users and companies, there is a risk of diluting the limit in cases where the holder of a bank account belongs to the 5463% of sole proprietorship SMEs in which a self-employed professional develops his profession and uses a single checking account to receive his Bizums, both personal and professional.
As and as they recommend from Bizum, in these cases, it is essential to identify the specific cause of each payment received through Bizum or, to avoid problems, separate payments from Bizum directed to the professional activity of the personal Bizum into different accounts.
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