Problems at the tax window in Madrid: a new computer system and untrained personnel in the middle of a payment campaign

"Hello, what about the IBI?", asks a citizen to the official Twitter account of the Madrid City Council.

Dozens of users have spent weeks complaining on the social network about the difficulties in paying municipal taxes -especially real estate taxes- in the capital.

Most of the criticisms are similar: people who had the tax domiciled and who have not been charged by the last deadline, that of November 30.

Concerned, they have insistently called 010, the municipal citizen service telephone number, which has been saturated for some time.

Without a telephone or online solution, many have chosen to go to one of the five Taxpayer Service offices, but they have not been able to remedy it there either.

According to the UGT, the majority union in the public body,

the incidents are due to the fact that the new computer system has been implemented in an accelerated manner, since the workers have not yet received adequate training to answer taxpayers' doubts.

The director of the Madrid Tax Agency (ATM), Gema Pérez, denies that there is a general problem and assures that they are specific and foreseeable situations within a digital transformation process.

Ana Mora and David Medrano, both 37 years old, recently bought a flat in the Tetuán district, in the north of the capital.

They have everything in order, except for the IBI.

“The owner must make the second payment to be able to change her ownership, but they haven't paid her,” she says.

She has it domiciled and 15 days after the expected payment date she still doesn't know what to do.

The couple writes to him often to see if there is progress: "She has been calling 010 for weeks and she is quite worried."

This number is one of the ways that the City Council offers to process the payment of taxes, and the management is quite simple, it is enough to have the credit card at 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 ten and eleven in the morning, according to data collected on the Consistory website.

In the entire month of November, there were 18,000 daily, and in the last fortnight 18% more people were answered by phone than in the same period in 2021, as explained last Friday by the Councilor for Territorial Coordination, Citizen Participation and Transparency, Silvia Saavedra.

The owner of the Mora y Medrano apartment sold the house to buy another, and now she is afraid of appearing on the list of delinquents and that this would pose a problem to sign a new mortgage.

The internet has not been able to solve the problem either.

As the collection is domiciled, if the citizen accesses the online procedure to pay the tax -with the electronic DNI or through the Cl@ve system- he finds that he cannot pay it himself.

Payment by bank card, electronic banking or checking account is blocked, and the following message pops up on the screen: "Currently all the taxes in his name are domiciled".

Screenshot of the message that appears on the website to process the IBI payment online when the user tries to pay it on their own.EL PAIS

This is what happened to Anabel Serrano on December 1, when she realized that the IBI had not been charged and entered the City Council page to try to solve it.

She still has not been able to, and the amount that appears on the web is higher than usual, because she has added the surcharge.

Next to the figure, two words: "A debt."

"I don't know when they're going to pass it on to me. And if it keeps going up?" She complains.

This is one of the technical failures that approximately 100 ATM employees -those who work with the public- have collected in a letter addressed to the director of the public body.

In the text, which they will send in the next few days, they state that since the new computer system was implemented on May 30, the incidents have been constant.

The main problem is that "everything has been done without a transitory process between the old and new applications, it has been all at once," says a UGT-ATM spokesman.

And he adds: “The new system multiplies the work.

We are making patches when there are programming errors and we have not thought about the final workers.

They are determined that everything works correctly and they tell us that we are falsifying reality”.

Álvaro Tapia, deputy general director of technology at the ATM, explains that technological change implies the migration of "millions and millions of data, after 30 years with another system", and that it is "foreseeable" that this will make some procedures difficult.

But UGT insists that the training has not been enough: “They kept repeating to us: 'This doesn't work now, but when it starts working it will.'

They entrust everything to computer applications and do not take into account the opinion of those who solve problems for the public”.

system failures

"Proof of payment of the IBI or the waste rate are not generated."

"The difficulties to pay the municipal capital gains tax are innumerable."

"It is impossible to process changes of ownership."

"IBI bonuses have not been applied to large families."

These are some of the failures listed by one of the ATM employees, who has been working in the taxpayer service offices for 15 years.

“We have requested in writing a number of incidents.

We have not yet received the data, but it is counted in thousands ”, he recounts.

The director, Gema Pérez, explains by video call that "every year there is a percentage of incidents that happen" and that this year they planned a slight increase.

But she insists that they are punctual: "The cases in which the charge has not been passed, will be passed from December 15, without any surcharge."

But if one searches for "IBI Madrid" on Twitter, numerous criticisms appear from users who on the 15th have not received the payment either.

Until this Wednesday, the official citizen service account on the social network responded to complaints with the following message: "Good evening, if you have a Special Payment System for the IBI or the Urban Waste Activity Fee, the charge in the bank account will occur between November 30 and December 15.

All the best".

A day later, the message is this: "Hello, the latest information we have is: 'If you have a Special Payment System for the IBI or the Rate of Urban Waste from Activities, the charge in the bank account will occur throughout of the month of December.

All the best".

Hello, the latest information we have is: "If you have a Special IBI Payment System or the Urban Waste Activity Rate, the charge to your bank account will occur throughout the month of December."

All the best.

– Madrid Line (@Lineamadrid) December 15, 2022

The councilor of Más Madrid Miguel Montejo, and the PSOE councilor Enma López, asked about the failures in the payment of the IBI, and the rest of the taxes, in the Finance and Personnel Commission, held this Monday.

The director of the ATM responded that "it was a lie" that it was not being collected well: "80% of the IBI that is domiciled has been collected without penalty or glory.

For the remaining 20% ​​it was expected that there would be incidents”, she replied.

She also announced that those receipts that have not arrived ―on the last day of voluntary payment, many citizens went to the offices because they had not received it― will be reissued.

“They call 10,000 calls a day [to 010] specific problems, this is not punctual.

People are going crazy.

There is extreme difficulty accessing appointments, you arrive at the office, you find an employee whose system does not work and who is frustrated.

They attend to many people a day, who get angry with them, but they are victims of an Administration that does not work ”, criticizes Montejo by phone.

Councilor Silvia Saavedra pointed out last week that the offices are serving 25% more than in 2021. “Errors are normal, but there is also an assumption of responsibilities and clear apologies to the taxpayer.

There must be information for the citizens and there has not been ", questions the socialist Enma López.

Mora and Medrano went to the Villaverde district office last week, and this is what they saw: “There was only one person there attending.

It took them an hour too long to get to our shift, because we had seven people in front of us who were going to solve the IBI issue”.

For the 62-year-old ATM employee and one of the 928 who work in the public body, day-to-day life is "chaos".

"The confusion in the offices is inversely proportional to the milestone that they promised us with the implementation of the system," he says.

"We were the star ship of the City Council and this undermines us."

He has witnessed several verbal attacks on his colleagues and tells that in the Hortaleza district office they have had to call the police several times.

"It's tremendous, many say they want to leave because they can't stand the stress," he laments.

"And here nobody takes responsibility."

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