Agencia Estatal de Administracion Tributaria (AEAT), the Spanish authority responsible for the national tax and customs systems, has begun issuing tax notices to crypto investors and other taxpayers in the country.
AEAT issuing tax notices to crypto investors
Despite the country experiencing a staggering situation amid the Coronavirus outbreak, the tax agency did not relent in sending tax notice, precisely to 66,000 cryptocurrency traders and investors in Spain, according to a report from a local news outlet.
AEAT began issuing the notice on 1st April and will last till the 30th of June, per the report. Compared to the previous records, the number of tax notices issued by AEAT to taxpayers, including those dealing with digital currency, increases with every passing year.
Approximately 66,000 tax notices
As of last year, the Spanish tax authority issued only 14,700 tax notices to crypto investors; however, the number has significantly increased to approximately 66,000. The increase perhaps indicates a keen interest in the country for cryptocurrency.
It is worth noting that the rapidly growing interest for cryptocurrency in Spain has also attracted the attention of AEAT, as the agency mostly targeted companies associated with digital currencies, in accordance to reports from the past two years.
At the time, AEAT mostly focused on cryptocurrency exchanges and ATMs, financial companies, and other firms that supported digital assets as a payment option. Meanwhile, only 16 companies from these categories were registered in Spain, as was disclosed in an analysis from the National Office of Fraud Investigation (ONIF)
Do notices come at the wrong time?
Reportedly, Spain sees a huge figure of confirmed cases of the coronavirus. The nation sees at least 110,000 cases to follow Italy and the United States. Altogether, their are over one million reported cases of the virus around the world today.
Amid the situation, the tax notices to crypto investors in Spain might work as planned, given that the number of new cases usually reported in the country is stabilizing, according to a spokesperson from the Spanish Health ministry’s emergency co-ordination unit, Maria Jose Sierra. She commented:
We continue with an increase of around 8%. This points, as we have already seen, to a stabilization in the data that we’re registering.
