Free afpop advice on how to receive tax credits for 2015 - deadline extended to February 22nd

Paul 17 February 2016

tax Tax advice - you have until Feb 22nd to act.

Here is another good reason to join the thousands of afpop members who benefit from timely advice sent by the association that specialises in providing information services and support to foreign residents and visitors to Portugal.

The advice note below, concering the new February 22nd Finanças deadline, has just been sent to members and is reproduced with permission and thanks.

Dear Members

In the June 2015 UPDATE magazine we issued an article, titled “Asking for an invoice” which mentioned different new tax credits in 2015, one of them being the General Family Expense credit (being able to deduct 35% of general everyday outlays such as groceries, travel, electricity, water, telephone, etc. to a maximum of 250.00 euros per taxpayer)

Since then Finanças has introduced a webpage where these invoices MUST be confirmed by the taxpayer, it is called e-factura and you have until February 22nd, 2016 to confirm your invoices from 2015.

Every taxpayer has an individual e-factura page on the Finanças website. In order to get to this page you need an access password, which is the same one used to access the taxpayer´s individual IRS page.

If you do not have this password yet, it must be requested from the Finanças website and it will be sent to you by post (within 5 working days).

Businesses declare invoices to Finanças and these invoices appear on each taxpayer's personal e-factura page and must then be confirmed. First you must confirm they are all there and correct. Second, some invoices can relate to different expenses for different activities, you may have to specify the activity to assist Finanças to determine what is what (health, education, family expenses etc.).

Where invoices are missing the taxpayer must enter them personally, but if the business later declares the invoice don´t worry, the invoices will appear in duplicate on the page but only one will count.

Invoices issued with the tax number of a child will also have to be confirmed and to do this you will need a separate password for each child.
Members who have a self-employed activity open in Finanças will also have to choose on the e-factura page whether the specific expense is outside their professional activity.

The Finanças website and also the e-factura page are in Portuguese only. Many Members may already have an accountant that will do this for them but it cannot hurt to ask if it is indeed being done because if invoices are not confirmed, the taxpayer cannot include the expenses as a deduction.

In the afpop office we have a document from Finanças that describes how to enter the e-factura page and how to confirm invoices, it is however only available in Portuguese but it is fortunately a very simple document with pictures. Should you wish to have this document to assist you, please request it from the office on info@afpop.com

If you need any assistance with this procedure, please feel free to contact the afpop office on tel : 282 458 509 or on the e-mail mentioned above.

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