Tax Echelon in Spain: the socialist government imposes measures typical of a dictatorship

In October I warned here about what the ultimate goal of socialism is: that the State controls everything.

Verifactu, a new socialist invention to control and hinder the SMEs and the self-employed
Socialist corruption in Spain briefly explained to people from other countries

In Spain, this controlling zeal is leading Pedro Sánchez's government to impose measures typical of a totalitarian regime that considers all Spaniards suspect (except, of course, those with a socialist party membership card, as the corruption scandals surrounding the PSOE are revealing). We already saw the case of Verifactu here, a new program designed to subject business owners and self-employed professionals to obsessive control, forcing them to immediately declare all their invoices to the Tax Agency under the pretext of combating tax fraud.

Now the Spanish Tax Agency is taking another step in its eagerness to treat us all like criminals. On November 26, it announced a change in the reporting obligations of financial institutions under the pretext of combating money laundering and the financing of terrorism. The announcement states that "the frequency of information provision is modified: both information on accounts and that relating to payment systems using cards or mobile phones will change from annual to monthly, allowing the Administration to have more current and useful data for carrying out its functions. The €3,000 threshold that limited the reporting obligation regarding card payments is also eliminated, in order to avoid the loss of relevant information."

Yesterday, Eva Díaz explained in El Economista what this means: now banks are obliged to report to the tax authorities all card payments made by business owners and the self-employed, regardless of the amount. Thus, more than three million self-employed professionals and more than three million companies will be treated as suspected criminals, all while the government is besieged by corruption scandals that currently include a judicial investigation into large cash payments in envelopes to socialist leaders. Thus, the government is placing a heavy fiscal scrutiny on business owners and the self-employed while turning a blind eye to its own party. This is outrageous and demonstrates what is taking root in Spain: a cocktail of authoritarianism and political corruption.

What is most astonishing is society's lack of reaction to these abuses. What would many Spaniards say if the government demanded they hand over all their communications via email, SMS, WhatsApp, and other means to the State? They could use the same excuse of combating terrorism and other types of crime. Obviously, it would be a scandal. Let's remember that in 2012 there was a scandal over the existence of the so-called Echelon network, with which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted a huge volume of communications searching for certain keywords. Many complained, rightly so, that this program violated the right to privacy and opened the door to potential abuses by the US government.

In Spain, we are facing a similar situation with these new tax measures, typical of a totalitarian regime. The difference is that here the government doesn't bother to intercept information through espionage; instead, it demands the handover of that information and publicly acknowledges it. To make matters worse, this is being done by a government whose attorney general has just been convicted of revealing secrets in a dirty operation to discredit a political rival of the socialists. It is a serious crime, but instead of apologizing, the socialists are attacking the judges for convicting the person responsible for that leak, as if the problem were not disseminating confidential information that was in the hands of the State, but condemning its dissemination.

What can we expect this government to do with the large volume of tax information it is now demanding? Spain has the most corrupt government in decades, a government entrenched in an authoritarian drift that includes attacks on judicial independence, attacks on independent media and to the right to privacy on social media. It's enough to see where all these events are leading to understand what's coming: with a minority government, socialism is imposing measures typical of a dictatorship, and sadly, it's doing so with very little resistance from society. Do we value freedom and democracy so little in Spain that we're willing to let ourselves be trampled on like this by these would-be dictators?

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Photo: PSOE.