PAYING BILLS AND CATASTRAL

[Roger]

MAKING SURE YOU PAY

One concern which people come to the Town Hall with is whether there are bills they have not paid because they do not know about them.

If there are bills hanging about they will eventually find you, often in the form of an embargo on your bank account. When this happens I know from experience that it is very difficult to find out why.

One enquiry we have had is about never receiving a Council Tax bill (IBI). Now we have access to the Town Hall documents we were able to find that the house has been registered for 6 years, even though the owner has never received a bill. In Spain it is your responsibility to check.
The result was a back dated IBI bill of 500 euros.

I have been through the Urban IBI register and identified 168 British owned houses which are registered. We are now checking with the Recaudacion office for the names of those who have not been paying. I will be contacting these people directly when I have the information.

The other issue regards Car Tax/Road Tax. This is sent to the address shown on your Permiso de Circulacion, although to complicate the matter from this year new cars do not have this information on the document although it is registered with the Trafico.
Therefore if the address is wrong or if you have moved and not informed the Trafico, you will not get the bill, but it is still owed. I am currently trying to trace someone who has moved to Valencia and has not informed the Trafico, leaving unpaid road tax.

CATASTRAL
We have been informed that around 1200 new properties are being registered this month and will be receiving IBI bills next year. The information we have so far is very confused, particularly because we do not have the names and addresses of the properties, only reference numbers. The outcome could be bills which cannot be delivered. This is a problem we will sort out. When we have the correct information we will be contacting people where the properties are not on the registration list.
At this stage people should take no action.