Lisbon, Sept. 25, 2025 (Lisboa) - International cooperation between tax authorities, which has become the norm in recent years at global level, helps tax authorities to detect tax evasion at an early stage, the Portuguese Secretary of State for Tax Affairs has said.
At a parliamentary hearing on Wednesday on the ‘report on combating tax and customs fraud and evasion’ in 2024, submitted to parliament in June, Secretary of State Cláudia Reis Duarte said that cooperation between tax authorities "is increasingly a decisive factor in the earlier and faster detection of non-compliance".
The Secretary of State highlighted some situations in which this cooperation had produced results, referring to the increase in the value of income declared in IRS (personal income tax) by €486.7 million, which, she said, was based on "a valuable element" of the "automatic exchange of international information".
According to the report, the Portuguese Tax and Customs Authority (AT) carried out 37,427 tax inspections and 6,636 customs inspections last year, totalling 44,063, which resulted in corrections of €1.314 billion, an increase of 11% over the previous year. In 2023, it had carried out 42,172 actions.
When questioned about the evolution of inspection actions by the Social Democrat (PSD) bench, Cláudia Reis Duarte said that "what really matters is that work is being done" on prevention.
"In recent years, there has been a gradual decrease" in inspections, because they are now directed at "more complex situations, often with an international dimension," with exchanges of information that take longer. Data analysis is also different today, "more complex and more time-consuming," she said.
The Portuguese Tax and Customs Authority is "increasingly focused" on investigating more complex fraud cases, she said in response to the Socialist (PS) parliamentary group.
The minister said that the AT's inspection department works "with a dual focus", on the one hand "prioritising voluntary compliance" and, on the other, "without neglecting the fight against highly complex fraud and evasion".
For the Secretary of State, it was this "multidimensional approach [that] made it possible to broaden the tax base and increase tax revenue" in 2024.
Tax evasion "penalises compliant taxpayers above all" and has other negative effects because it "distorts the functioning of the market" and undermines confidence in institutions, said the Secretary of State.
In the report, the Government points out that the AT is subject to "different regimes" for the exchange of information in the area of income tax (in the case of the IRS), whether through bilateral agreements (between the tax authorities and the tax authorities of another country) or through multilateral agreements, "agreements on the exchange of information in tax matters (ATI), and those established by Community law sources (directives and regulations)".
"The exchange of information may occur upon request, spontaneously or automatically. The first form covers situations in which one State requests specific and concrete information from another State. The second occurs when a State, in the course of applying its own tax legislation and exercising its powers, obtains information that it considers relevant to the other State. Automatic exchange consists of the systematic communication of predefined information to another State at predetermined intervals," the document reads.
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