The High Court of Justice of Catalonia states that receipts can also be submitted to deduct expenses.
Is an invoice necessary when a self-employed worker wants to claim tax relief for an expense related to his professional activity? Until now the answer was a resounding yes. Now it is no longer so clear, following a ruling by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia which states that the Tax Agency must also accept expenses deducted through receipts and not exclusively through invoices.
Tickets are valid even if company data is missing
The ruling makes it clear that the fact that some tax data of the company selling the goods or providing the service are missing from the receipts does not mean that the document should be discarded. In its opinion, this is considered a “formal anomaly” that should not prevent the self-employed person from deducting the expense. If this situation were to be prevented, the High Court of Justice says that the deduction of an expense would be prevented from the tax authorities due to the identity of the person who sold the goods or provided the service being unknown.
In this regard, according to the Court, the agencies have so far adopted the guidelines of the Administration. Hence, they demand that their clients, in order to be able to deduct the expenses, must provide the corresponding invoice. And, if this is not the case, they cannot deduct them. To do so, they adhere to the requirements set out in the invoicing regulations. This establishes that if the recipient is not identified, the expenses cannot be deducted.
Test the expenses
The self-employed person must take into account, as the ruling also details, that in order to deduct any expense, there must be a certain correlation with his income. This means that the expenses must be related to the professional activity he carries out and must not be disproportionate. In any case, if there is doubt about the origin of the expenses, it will be the Inspection that must prove that the expenses have no relation to the activity. And not the other way around. That is, the self-employed person must prove that they are necessary expenses for his work and that he has not included expenses that cannot be deducted, as it was believed that he had to do until now.
In any case, the receipt will be necessary. Therefore, expenses such as gasoline, stationery or any other in small shops can be deducted with receipts, although it is recommended, despite this, that if the amounts are of a certain volume, an invoice is requested.
Source: Five days- El País
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