2016 Year-End Spanish Corporate Income Tax Checklist (I)

There are new measures that are of interest to know in order to optimise your company’s year–end tax closing.

2016 Year –end Spanish Corporate income tax checklist (I)

As every year, we are approaching the end of the fiscal year of our enterprises. Although the Spanish corporate income tax rule applying to fiscal year 2016 entered into force in 2015, there are new measures that we believe might be of your interest as well as others worth remembering, in order to optimise your company’s year – end tax closing.

In this and in a subsequent post, we shall review the most relevant aspects of the 2016 Spanish Corporate income tax closing that you should be aware of, before December 31 of this year.

Tax depreciation:

We remind you that you should review the conformance of the assets’ accounting depreciation to tax rules and verify whether you can take the maximum profit of this expense to reduce the taxable base.

For example, new fixed assets whose unit value does not exceed 300.00 Euro, with a maximum limit of 25,000.00 Euro per fiscal year, can be freely depreciated.

Besides, companies that do not qualify as small – sized entities can recover the positive book to tax adjustments made in 2013 and 2014, by reverting them negatively and generating a tax credit of 5% of the reversed amounts.

✔As a new measure, for fiscal years starting from January 01, 2016, all intangible assets are considered as having a limited useful life and have, therefore, to be amortized for accounting purposes. In the event that the asset’s useful life cannot be estimated, the useful life is set at 10 years. Given that the Spanish Corporate income tax Law foresees a maximum tax – deductible expense of 5% for intangible assets whose useful life cannot be determined on a reliable basis, you will have to review the book to tax adjustments to be made from now on to these assets.

Non –deductible expenses:

Remember that you will have to identify the accounting expenses that do not qualify as tax – deductible, in order to make a positive book to tax adjustment in the tax return, for concepts such as:

• Expenses corresponding to interest deriving from profit sharing loans granted by companies of the same group, but, attention, only as from June 20, 2014.
• Expenses deriving from gifts to customers / suppliers exceeding 1% of the net turnover of your company in a fiscal year.
• Penalties and surcharges in the executive process as well as for filing out –of – term tax returns.
• Gifts and donations.

There is more to come in our next post. So, please do not miss it!