The company responds to the Treasury for the diets of its workers in the IRPF

The Supreme Court sets doctrine and states that the worker complies by providing the declaration

The Treasury cannot require the worker to prove the veracity of the living expenses declared as exempt in the IRPF. The person responsible for justifying these amounts is the employer, who in his capacity as payer must prove the reality of the displacements and the reason for them. This is established by the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court in a recent ruling (whose text can be consulted here), which establishes doctrine on this issue.

In this way, the high court definitively ditch the debate over who is responsible for justifying the exemption of these diets from the Treasury. Some higher courts of justice had determined that it was up to the worker. According to the Supreme Court, in case of doubt about the expenses recorded, the AEAT has to address the employer, not the taxpayer. According to the Supreme Court, the worker fulfills his obligation by completing his statement with the certificates issued by the company. “The taxpayer cannot be required to provide data that must already be documented to the Administration itself,” he adds.

The Chamber resolves in favor of a worker, a veterinarian by profession, in relation to the appeal filed against a decision of the Superior Court of Justice (TSJ) of Galicia for an IRPF settlement. The Treasury doubted that the allowances reflected as living expenses met the requirements to be exempt. That is, they were payments made to replace the disbursements made by the worker in his travels. For this reason, it required the taxpayer to provide documentation (invoices or equivalent) to justify them.

The suspicion that the payments recorded as exempted in their declarations were not real came from the fact that they coincided with the result of multiplying the maximum amount established for non-overnight trips within the municipality (26.67 euros per day) per day. Workdays of the month. That made one think that “it was a remuneration agreement between worker and company, disconnected from the purpose of the diets.”