“Hello, what about the IBI?” asks a citizen on the Madrid City Council’s official Twitter account. Dozens of users have been complaining on the social network for weeks about the difficulties in paying municipal taxes – especially property taxes – in the capital. Most of the criticisms are similar: people who had the tax domicile and who were not charged until the last deadline, November 30th. Concerned, they urgently called the 010 of the municipal citizen service, which had been overloaded for some time. Without a telephone or online solution, many have opted for one of the five taxpayer service points, but were unable to find any help there either. According to UGT, the majority union in the public body, the incidents are due to the accelerated rollout of the new computer system, as workers have not yet received adequate training to respond to taxpayers’ doubts. The director of the Madrid Tax Agency (ATM), Gema Pérez, denies a general problem and assures that these are specific and predictable situations within a digital transformation process.
Ana Mora and David Medrano, both 37, recently bought an apartment in the Tetuán district, north of the capital. You have everything in order except for the IBI. “The owner has to make the second payment to change ownership, but he didn’t make it,” she says. He has it at home and 15 days after the scheduled payment date, he still doesn’t know what to do. The couple text him often to see if there is any progress: “She has been calling 010 for weeks and is very worried.”
This number is one of the ways that the City Council offers to process the payment of taxes and managing it is quite simple, it is enough to have the credit card on hand to pay the tax. But the lines have been saturated for months. Last week, for example, they received an average of 6,000 calls between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m., according to data collected on the consistory’s website. For the entire month of November, it was 18,000 daily, and in the last two weeks, 18% more people were answered by phone than in the same period in 2021, Councilor for Territorial Coordination, Civic Participation and Transparency, Silvia Saavedra, said last Friday.
The owner of the apartment in Mora y Medrano sold the house to buy another one and now she is afraid that she will appear on the delinquent list and that this could pose a problem for signing a new mortgage. Even the internet couldn’t solve the problem. Since the collection is domiciled, when the citizen accesses the online procedure to pay the tax “with the electronic DNI or through the Cl@ve system”, he realizes that he cannot pay it himself. Payment by bank card, e-banking or current account will be blocked and the message will appear on the screen: “Currently all taxes are direct debits in your name”.
Screenshot of the message that appears on the webpage to process the IBI payment online when the user tries to pay it himself.EL PAIS
This happened to Anabel Serrano on December 1st, when she realized the IBI had not been charged and sided with the city council to try and resolve the issue. He hasn’t been able to do it yet and the amount that shows on the web is higher than usual because they added the supplement. Next to the figure two words: “A debt.” “I don’t know when they’ll pass it on to me. And if it goes further up?” he complains.
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This is one of the technical errors collected by about 100 ATM employees – those who work with the public – in a letter to the director of the public body. The text they will send in the next few days states that since the implementation of the new computer system on May 30, there have been constant incidents.
The main problem is that “everything happened without a transition process between the old and new applications, it was all at once,” says a UGT-ATM spokesman. And he adds: “The new system multiplies the work. We make patches when there are bugs and we didn’t think about the final workers. They firmly believe that everything is working correctly and tell us that we are distorting reality.”
Álvaro Tapia, Deputy Director General for Technology at ATM, explains that technological change involves the migration of “millions and millions of data after 30 years with a different system” and that it is “foreseeable” that this will complicate some procedures . But UGT insists the training wasn’t enough: “They kept telling us, ‘This won’t work now, but when it starts to work.’ They entrust everything to computer applications and do not take into account the opinion of those who solve problems for the public.”
system failures
“Proofs of payment of the IBI or the waste quota are not created.” “The difficulties of paying municipal capital gains tax are innumerable.” “Cannot edit ownership changes.” “IBI premiums were not applied to large families.” These are some of the mistakes listed by one of the ATM employees who has worked in the taxpayers’ service bureaus for 15 years. “We have requested a number of incidents in writing. We haven’t received the data yet, but there are thousands of them,” he says. The director, Gema Pérez, explains via video call that “every year a percentage of incidents happen” and that this year they are planning a slight increase. But he insists on punctuality: “The cases in which the summons was not passed will be passed without a surcharge from December 15.”
However, if you search for “IBI Madrid” on Twitter, numerous criticisms appear from users who did not receive the payment on the 15th either. As of this Wednesday, the social network’s official citizen service account responded to complaints with the following message: “Good evening, if you have a special payment system for the IBI or municipal waste activity fee, the bank account will be debited between November 30 and November 15. December. All the best.” A day later, the message reads: “Hello, the latest information we have is: ‘If you have a special payment system for the IBI or Municipal Waste From Activities rate, the bank account will be debited during the entire month of December. All the best”.
Hello, the latest information we have is: “If you have a special IBI payment system or the municipal waste activity tariff, your bank account will be debited during the month of December.” All the best.
– Madrid Line (@Lineamadrid) December 15, 2022
Más Madrid City Councilor Miguel Montejo and PSOE Councilor Enma López asked this Monday in the Finance and Human Resources Commission about the errors in the payment of the IBI and the rest of the taxes. The ATM director replied that “it was a lie” that it was not collected well: “80% of the IBI that are domiciled were confiscated with no penalty or honor.” Incidents were expected for the remaining 20%,” she replied. He also announced that receipts that did not arrive – on the last day of voluntary payment, many citizens went to the offices because they had not received them – will be reissued.
“They make 10,000 calls a day with certain problems [al 010], that’s not on time. People go crazy. Access to appointments is extremely difficult, you arrive at the office to find an employee whose system is not working and who is frustrated. Every day they take care of many people who resent them, but they are victims of an administration that doesn’t work,” Montejo criticized over the phone. Councilor Silvia Saavedra last week pointed out that the departments are doing 25% more than in 2021. “Errors are normal, but there is also an acceptance of responsibility and a clear apology to the taxpayer. There has to be information for the citizens, and there wasn’t,” the socialist Enma López questions.
Mora and Medrano went to the Villaverde district office last week and saw the following: “There was only one person present. They took an hour too long to get to our shift because we had seven people in front of us who wanted to solve the IBI problem.” For the 62-year-old ATM worker and one of the 928 employees of the public institution, everyday life is “Chaos”. “The confusion in the offices is inversely proportional to the milestone they promised us with the implementation of the system,” he says. “We were the city council’s star ship and that undermines us.”
He has witnessed several verbal attacks on his colleagues and says that they had to call the police several times at the Hortaleza district office. “It’s huge, many say they want to leave because they can’t take the stress,” he regrets. “And nobody takes responsibility here.”
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