Shakira thought she'd won. After a judge in April wiped out €55 million ($63 million) in tax claims against her, she dedicated her victory to "ordinary citizens who are abused and crushed every day by a system that presumes their guilt."
Spain's tax agency has since
Her outburst landed at a moment when tax affairs in Spain were under heightened scrutiny. Arguments that once played out largely between inspectors and specialist lawyers have spilled into public view, drawing in campaigners, unions, politicians and even officials charged with enforcing fiscal laws.
The Colombian singer was among the performers at the football World Cup final half-time show outside New York City on Sunday, where Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time.
No critic of Spain's tax regime has been louder than Robert Amsterdam, a U.S. attorney known for pairing legal defense with advocacy aimed at shaping public opinion. Through newspaper ads, documentaries, a dedicated website and a steady stream of social-media content, he's sought to turn an argument about expatriate levies into a broader criticism of Spain's tax agency.
"Our aim is really simple," he told Bloomberg News. "We want to make tax a political issue." He declined to name his backers or quantify the number of clients he's defending in Spain.
Amsterdam initially focused on the special tax regime introduced in 2005 to attract foreign talent and named after one of its best-known beneficiaries, footballer David Beckham. He describes the regime as a "trap" designed to lure foreigners before subjecting them to intrusive investigations and lengthy legal battles that can make challenging the agency prohibitively costly.
That account, though, overlooks the fact that the regime "has been used fraudulently by certain law firms," said Esaú Alarcón, a tax lawyer in Barcelona, referring to a series of other athletes who allegedly concealed the income earned from image rights in other countries to avoid paying tax.
Alarcón said the regime is largely working as intended. According to the tax agency, only around 185 of the nearly 37,000 taxpayers who used the Beckham regime over the past decade were inspected for possible irregularities, and only a fraction of those inspections ultimately ended in formal disputes.
'Smear campaign'
Over time, Amsterdam's campaign has widened into a broader tax authority critique, though many complaints he's amplified predate his involvement.
The government has described the criticisms as a "smear campaign." Speaking recently in Madrid, Treasury Minister Arcadi España warned against framing taxation as wrong. "As if paying any kind of tax were theft," he said. "People who move elsewhere simply to pay less tax cannot be treated as heroes."
Asked about Amsterdam's allegation of "intrusive inspections," the tax agency said investigations are subject to multiple layers of oversight to ensure they are proportionate and consistent. It said no case is closed by a single official. Instead, teams carry out investigations before the findings are reviewed by technical specialists and senior officials under ministry guidelines. The agency also rejected the idea that they prioritize cases that are more easily quantifiable or that there is governmental interference.
Still, confidence in the agency has morphed into a political issue.
The recent departure of Director General Soledad Fernandez Doctor fuelled speculation that it was linked to government negotiations over Catalonia's financing model or to investigations into a former prime minister — allegations both she and the government denied. After Fernandez's successor was appointed earlier this month, the inspectors' association asked him in a statement to defend the agency's integrity and protect it from "external interference."
Awkwardly for the government, some of the sharpest rebukes have come from inspectors themselves. Their association has repeatedly called for changes to the agency's priorities so they can dedicate more time to complex fraud, which they say is neglected in favor of more easily detectable wrongdoing
That problem is compounded by looming retirements. Half of the agency's 26,000 employees are expected to retire by 2032, with hiring failing to keep pace, according to José María Pelaez, former head of the inspectors association.
Bonuses
The nation's tax advisors association, AEDAF, has also questioned the opacity of the agency's incentives for staff, arguing that taxpayers' should know whether part of the inspectors' variable remuneration is linked to collection targets.
It spent years litigating to obtain information, winning court rulings that forced the administration to disclose the formula for bonuses. While there's no direct link between the debt collected and the bonus an inspector receives, revenue levels do feed into staff's bonuses, which represent about 20% of overall pay.
"It's not a simple system," said Bernardo Bante, the group's president. "Bonuses are determined by a wide range of factors at the individual, team, regional and national levels." He said "the problem is having an incentive tied to the amount of tax liability. Not a single euro of performance pay should be linked to the value of a tax adjustment," he said.
Employees of the tax agency also complain that the remuneration system lacks transparency. Until data protection rules were introduced in 2019, staff knew how much every employee earned, said José María Mollinedo of Gestha, a union representing tax technicians, who sit below inspectors in the hierarchy. The union is working to restore access to pay information so workers can have a better idea of how compensation packages compare within categories.
The tax agency rejected the idea that the remuneration system lacks transparency, and referred to
The inspectors' association also pointed out that the bonus linked to the debt collected is very small and that the metric is shared across groups, meaning that no individual gets a cut of the debt they have personally collected. Many employees who receive that component are not themselves collecting debt, Pelaez said. Moreover, most tax administrations have some form of performance-linked pay or rewards, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Lower taxes
Heightened scrutiny of agency practices is playing out against a backdrop of growing pressure on Spain's public finances, as future pension and ageing costs are expected to rise faster than the pool of workers paying into the system.
National tax revenues have helped fill the gap, increasing more than 46% since 2021, with each of the last four years setting a new all-time record. Despite lower inflation, the tax haul jumped 10.4% last year on the back of rising wages and pensions, company profits and consumption.
But while Spain is under pressure to collect more, it's hardly alone among its peers, including France, Italy or Germany, which all have higher levels of taxation.
In her dispute, the pop star accepted six counts of tax fraud relating to the 2012, 2013 and 2014 tax years without contesting the case at trial, but litigated the 2011 tax year.
The judge found that the authorities' own calculation placed her in Spain for only 163 days in 2011 — short of the more than 183-day threshold for tax residence — and could not treat her time abroad as "sporadic absences" because they had not first established that Spain was her habitual residence.
In a 2024 interview, she said she settled to protect her children, "
Whatever the outcome of the agency's appeal to the Supreme Court, the debate has already moved beyond one celebrity's tax return.
