With the start of the deadline for submitting the annual income tax declaration, millions of taxpayers sought the fastest way on the State’s financial portal. The ease of sending taxes through the automatic IRS hides a silent financial trap that has just cost many Portuguese families hundreds of euros.
The answer to this loss of money lies in blindly accepting the predefined calculations by the company’s computer system. The state algorithm often assumes the separate taxation regime for couples because it considers the simplest mathematical division at the time of the initial calculation. It indicates the same source that the joint simulation results in a substantially higher reimbursement in the vast majority of households with very different incomes.
Citizens trust the numbers presented on the main screen and press the confirmation button without simulating the alternative scenario available on the electronic platform. This hasty validation prevents the immediate correction of the document and ends the process with an amount to be received much lower than the worker’s legal right.
Ignored health and education expenses
The mechanism pre-populated by the State bases its accounts exclusively on invoices that were duly validated in the electronic system by the end of February. Families who forgot to manually check their routine consumption lose the right to dozens of essential deductions in the areas of health and education.
The digital platform does not allow the manual entry of missing receipts after the automatic route has been definitively chosen. The only solution to recover these amounts is to completely reject the pre-made model and carefully fill out a traditional declaration.
Income off the IT radar
The State’s IT portal is unaware of several categories of financial gains that require an optional inclusion to lower the final tax applied to the citizen. Small investors who made profits from shares or investment funds are prevented from optimizing their tax burden through this quick method.
The convenience of a process resolved in a minute translates into a very heavy bill for those who have financial assets earning bank interest. Cross-checking these specific data requires the delivery of a private annex that is completely blocked in the simplified version of the annual declaration.
The Portuguese State provides this innovative tool to speed up the bureaucratic process, but the responsibility for final validation of the data lies entirely with the taxpayer. The natural temptation to receive the money in the bank account within two weeks clouds the necessary discernment when analyzing the simulation.
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