Fluffyhead

I wasn't sure how to title this thread but I thought the following could be of interest to those who choose englobamento and encounter problems:

We wanted to choose englobamento on our tax return this year but we kept getting an error - we'd forgotten you had to include interest from Portuguese banks which you have to request. As we'd left it to the last minute we submitted the return not using englobamento, intending to submit a 2nd one once we had seen how much the first one would be. Having just got the payment request for the first return and now armed with the bank interest info we once again tried to submit using englobamento but no, same error "not declared as much as the banks tell us you had!".
Called Finanças and asked them to tell us what information they had from the banks and thankfully the guy told us. Turns out we had interest and tax retained by a bank that we don't have an account with !!! The taxman told us we'd have to sort it out with the bank, so after calling Millenium head office they told us we had to go into our local branch (of course) which is where we spent 2 hours this morning trying to work out how this mess happened. We managed to find the tax declaration Millenium had sent to Finanças about my husband but there was nothing on their system about me even though according to Finanças a similar amount was declared for me? The man we saw was very helpful and even wrote a letter for us to sign that he sent to head office asking them to fix it with Finanças, which if they don't then I don't know what we can do.
Last year we had the same problem but didn't pursue it, just paid more tax than I believe we should have, so this could have been going on for years. Interestingly the interest was not huge but not the scrot you get these days, making us hope that we had a Millenium account we'd forgotten about (we were with them when we first arrived in Portugal) but the man in the bank said we had no account with them. Never a dull moment!

SgtTroy

I seem to be missing something here.

If you go for englobamento, that means you pay tax on rates lower than 28% tax at source, and you would expect some refund of the tax already retained at source.

For the sake of the argument, let's say that Millenium assigned to both you and your husband a total of 100 euro of interest, on which there has been a deduction at source of 28 euro.

In the circumstances, you would be getting some of that 28 euro back due to the englobamento.

How does all that work to your disadvantage?

Fluffyhead

It's a valid point and made me smile but we've set the wheels in motion to get the problem fixed, as we didn't want to make a false declaration.
As I mentioned, we tried last year unsuccessfully to do englobamento but gave up as we thought we were out of time but having asked this year and received the following reply from finanças it seems, if my understanding is correct, time never runs out:
"O prazo para entrega da da declaração de rendimentos é, tanto no caso de ser uma primeira declaração ou declaração de substituição, 30 de junho de 2022. Contudo, uma vez que se encontre na posse de documento comprovativo dos montantes a inscrever na declaração, pode desde já proceder à regularização pretendida através da entrega de uma declaração de substituição."
I'm now wondering if we can go back and re-submit for 2020 as i believe we paid way too much tax that year!

SgtTroy

well, it appears that Millenium/AT are in fact making a false declaration
your choice would be whether to spend many hours/days to resolve it, or just respectfully point it out to them, and go along with their figures, as incorrect as they might be.
in any case the interest from Millenium appears to be of insignificant value, so no harm either way

Fluffyhead

Finally sorted with the help on the complaints book and several phone calls. There were no false declarations just a cock up on Activo's part. We had bought some shares in sic through Activo and had a couple of dividends we never noticed which Millenium (as Activo's parent company) declared to finanças. Activo was supposed to supply that info when we asked for 2021's declaration of interest but didn't. No compensation for our grief of course but just successfully submitted a new tax return - hurrah!

SgtTroy

It's them bloody banks again...

Fluffyhead

It's one less headache and at least we've been here long enough now not to close the account for being messed around