If you own a country property or a villa in Spain, please pay attention if you receive a certified letter from the ‘ministerio de Hacienda y Administraciones públicas’ and notify your lawyer or gestor inmediately. Through areal photos the cadastre is ‘remeasuring’ and re-valuing property. In our case these ‘remeasurements’ were completely incorrect, they doubled the size of our property and therefore doubled the amount of IBI (local tax) I would have to pay! Beware and take action on these very improper actions from the Spanish government.
By coincidence I saw the other day on the cadastre site that the size of our property had suddenly changed. Strange, I thought, I would have to look into this. Caught up in work I forgot to follow up on this untill I received a certified letter from the tax ministry notifying me that after ‘inspection’ it was noted that the declared built size of my property in the cadastre was corrected from the original 240m2 to 491m2 constructed area. Resulting in a new cadastral value of almost double the former one. So you can image what my IBI bill will look like in September! The most annoying thing is, I haven’t done any changes to my house, the originally declared size is correct. This is straightforward government bullying!
Reclaim
According to the letter I have 15 days to put my allegations against this decision. This can either be done by a certified letter to the regional cadastre, Málaga in my case, or by visiting the department personally. The latter was advised by the lady on the telephone. Why? because it is not 100% clear what documentation I would have to provide to prove that my property measures only 240m2. I would have to bring architectural plans if I have them, a copy of the deed, photos might help as well… In other words, better to go personally and explain the situation. Nice! So in order to correct the mistakes of the government I have to invest time and money. I have an appointment for next week, I will keep you updated!
Anita Schmidt | 3rd May 2013