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Article 31.1 of the Spanish Constitution states that everyone must contribute to sustaining public expenditure in proportion to their ability to pay. Over the last forty years, this duty has given rise to many judgments of the Constitutional Court in which it analyses the different functions that the ability to pay principle carries out in our tax system and its double-faceted nature as both a right and duty. This paper intends to review that jurisprudence in order to lay out the limitations of the ability to pay principle and the impossibility of using it as the only reference when interpreting the tax rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has traditionally been accepted that one may arrange his or her affairs in order minimize taxation if, in doing so, the individual is compliant with legal obligations. The judgment of the Supreme Court handed down on 19 July 2016 questioned the validity of that traditional understanding when it stated that morality also limits taxpayers' individual autonomy. This paper reviews the reasons underlying the traditional understanding and addresses several effects of the recent reexamination on legitimate tax planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basic Law 7/2012, passed by the Spanish Parliament on December 27th 2012, has substantially changed the regulation of tax fraud in the Spanish Criminal Code. Among other things, this Act of Parliament has changed the legal nature and requirements of the defence of regularization, has introduced new aggravating circumstances that widen the statute of limitations to ten years, and has provided the Spanish Tax Authorities with new tools that intend to ease the prosecution of these crimes. This paper studies in detail all the changes brought by Basic Law 7/2012, analyzing them in the context of the changes both in statutory and case law that have taken place in the last twenty years, and describes the practical problems that may arise when the new regulation is enforced. The conclusion of this analysis is that the reform enacted in Basic Law 7/2012 is another step in the criminalization of breaches of tax rules, sets inconsistent criteria that generally play against taxpayers and increases legal uncertainty. All this entails a significant increase in the legal and compliance risks that corporations doing business in Spain must face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain and the U.S. have recently agreed to enter into an agreement pursuant to which Spain will adopt the necessary implementing legislation to collect the information required by FATCA from its domestic financial institutions and will then report that information to the U.S. tax authorities under an automatic exchange system based on the existing tax treaty. The agreement will help Spanish financial institutions to comply with FATCA. In this paper we describe the background and content of the future agreement, preliminarily identifying the practical consequences for financial institutions based in Spain [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]