Vindication for most taxpayers
Almost two out of every three taxpayers who resorted to the Directorate for Dispute Resolution (DED) in September were vindicated – a particularly impressive ratio.
This is the first time in the history of the department at the Independent Authority for Public Revenue that it has recorded such a high rate of approval of taxpayers’ complaints. That’s because a major portion of the successful cases concerned pensioners who resorted to DED even for small amounts of retroactive dues and have almost all been vindicated.
Normally the rate of complaints accepted by this directorate ranges between 35% and 40% each month.
There was also another record in September: DED examined 1,201 cases, while in previous months it hadn’t handled any more than 500. That acceleration in processing is attributed to the fact that many of those cases had an October 29 deadline. Consequently the tax administration demanded that DED staff work overtime so as to examine as many cases as possible, which proved to be the right decision: Hundreds of pensioners who have now been vindicated would have otherwise had to comply with the verdict of their tax office, given that it would not make any sense for them to resort to justice when the amounts at stake were so small.
The figures that the IAPR has released showed that out of the 1,201 complaints submitted, 752 were partly or wholly accepted, 427 were rejected and 22 taxpayers withdrew their cases.
Even though the number of cases heard soared by 129%, there are still many outstanding complaints at DED: Pending cases amounted to 9,646 in September, so only an eighth of them were examined; instead of them dropping to 8,445, they amounted to 9,080 at end-September, owing to the new cases submitted, which come in at a rate of about 300 every 10 days.
IAPR figures show that while on September 1, 2019, pending cases had amounted to just 1,834, the backlog soared to 5,705 complaints in 2020 amid the lockdowns and reached 9,080 in September 2021.
