The Spanish Constitutional Court suspends the law of the Tax Agency of Catalonia

The Spanish Constitutional Court has suspended the law of the Tax Agency of Catalonia as a precaution in response to the appeal made by Mariano Rajoy’s government, in which the Spanish government alleged the breach of equal rights to public function because the Catalan law establishes that it should include state officials from the Catalan Government. The suspension is for five months until a resolution is made on the appeal based on unconstitutionality. The law was intended to pave the way to Catalonia’s own tax office, one of the state structures being prepared by different forces of the Catalan parliament, including the governing party.

Article 4 of the law establishes the creation of two additional provisions of the regulation which are those that enable voluntary integration, with the recognition of the rights that this entails, of officials from the state and other administrations in the higher echelons of Tax Inspectors and Tax Management Technicians of the Government of Catalonia.

According to the law, voluntary integration in the technical body of tax managers of the Government of Catalonia through specific calls is open to ‘officials whose assigned functions substantially coincide with those of the institution and which are definitively intended for the territorial area of Catalonia’. The problem, according to Moncloa, lies in the fact of requiring the definitive destination to be Catalonia as this ‘excludes the right of people interested in the rest of the state from entering under equal conditions’. Nor does it allow officials not giving service in the Catalan Government administration to enter through integration in its public office, which ‘is also a way to enter the public function from the beginning’.

This is another demonstration of ‘asphyxia and recentralisation’

The vice-president of the Catalan government, Neus Munté, has criticised the Spanish government’s decision to appeal against the extension of the Tax Agency of Catalonia (ATC) and has qualified it as ‘a further demonstration of the recentralisation and asphyxia on the citizens and productive sectors’. Munté confirmed that the Generalitat Government of Catalonia will challenge the decision and guaranteed that, despite the ‘obstacles’, the extension process ‘has not been blocked’. In October the public contracting should be put out to tender, although the vice-president has recognised that the planned schedule will not be able to be followed.