The Tax Agency with the right to them, who can request them through a new form for this that the organization has activated since last summer on its website. The document can be completed and presented at any time of the year, but be careful: to fully benefit from the refund, obtaining reimbursement for the last non-prescribed years, you do not have to miss the date.
Taxpayers who have not yet requested a refund under any formula – neither through the , nor by other means, such as requests for rectification of the income tax return – must request it before February 2, 2026 to obtain the refund in a single payment for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022. If they delay, February 2, 2027 would be the deadline to jointly request the refund for 2021 and 2022; In the case of personal income tax corresponding to 2022, the limit is February 2, 2028. From that moment on, they will no longer be able to submit the form, although they will be entitled to a refund in personal income tax in each income campaign.
Those affected do not have to specify on the form the years for which they request the refund of undue income, since the Tax Agency itself studies the situation of each taxpayer who presents the document. For the immediately preceding financial year, the refund is automatic: in the next year’s personal income tax return – which will be the one relating to 2025 income – the refund will be made ex officio, as already happened in the income campaign of this year and last, corresponding to the personal income tax of 2023 and 2024.
The right to return has its roots in the very foundations of the Welfare State. In the 1970s, with the creation of Social Security, it was established that the contributions paid were deductible from income tax. However, this benefit was not extended to workers who contributed to the old labor mutual societies, the precursors of Social Security until its full implementation.
The legislator attempted to fix the comparative grievance with the introduction of a transitional provision in the personal income tax law. The modification recognized mutual members the possibility of deducting a percentage of personal income tax in the part of the pension that corresponded to contributions to mutual societies, but the discount was not applied in practice.
In recent years, the Supreme Court has been determining that mutual members had the right to have the transitional provision applied to them, in response to an appeal filed by retirees of the banking labor mutual society—opening the door to an avalanche of claims with the possibility of requesting refunds for the previous four years, which is the general period of administrative prescription. The Ministry of Finance for the public coffers.
Paralysis of procedures
In the spring of last year, the Tax Agency to expedite returns for the current year and non-prescribed years into a single payment. However, a few months later, on December 22, 2024, it paralyzed the procedures: it voided all requests for compensation that had not been paid before December 22, forcing them to resubmit them, disabled the form and established that those affected would claim the excess tax from year to year, within the deadlines provided for submitting the income tax return.
The Ministry of Finance justified its decision due to the difficulty in managing the flood of applications received, but had to back down after a few months due to the rejection it generated among those affected, in the political and union world. Last summer it enabled a new form and resumed refunds in a single payment.
Due to the regulatory change, the Tax Agency applies different deadlines to those retirees who requested the refund before December 22, 2024 and who did not obtain compensation. These mutual members must submit the new form, since the previous one was disqualified, but in this case the period ends by adding 4 years and 217 days to the date on which the previous application was submitted.
The Tax Agency itself gives an example: if a refund request was submitted on September 10, 2024, the deadline to submit the new form would end on April 15, 2029, 4 years and 217 days later.
