Taxpayers will have between March 15th and May 31st to submit the 2023 Income Tax (IR) declaration and settle their accounts with Leão.
During the filling, it is important to pay attention to avoid errors that could delay the receipt of the refund for those who are entitled
This is because, when sending the declarations, the data undergoes an analysis of the Federal Revenue systems, which analyze the information provided and compare it with data from other entities.
Any irregularity can lead the taxpayer to fall into the fine mesh, delaying and even preventing the receipt of his refund.
In the year 2022, 1,032,279 people fell into the fine mesh, which is equivalent to 2.7% of the 38,188,642 statements sent.
To prevent the taxpayer from making a mistake when filling out the declaration, the Revenue has been developing a mechanism to facilitate the process. However, you still need to be careful when filling it out.
Check out the most common mistakes that lead taxpayers to fall into the fine mesh:
filling errors
When completing the information on the Income Tax return, taxpayers need to pay extra attention. Just one typo can be enough to take the declaration to the fine mesh.
According to data collected by the Federal Revenue, these types of errors represent 5% of inconsistencies in retained documents.
“The person takes the proof of income and when typing it, they make a mistake or reverse the CNPJ of the source, or put a value in the wrong place. This means that the information that comes to us is not the same as what the paying source is informing”, reports the National Supervisor of the Income Tax Program, José Carlos Fernandes da Fonseca.
Problems like this cause pending issues to be identified in the document and the declaration is directed to an analysis.
omission of income
In addition to filling errors, another problem identified within the fine mesh is the omission of yield.
According to the Revenue, the omission of income was the main reason for declarations to be withheld last year, equivalent to 40.6% of cases.
There are three factors within yield omissions that are prevalent in the mesh:
- Omission of the paying source
This type of error is more common for taxpayers who have changed jobs or are doing work on the side of their main job, such as freelancers.
In this case, the person performs a service and, at the time of the declaration, informs only the values of his main company, forgetting to inform the other companies that provided the service.
The Federal Revenue also reports that situations are common in which taxpayers report a receipt amount, but the company informs that, in fact, the amount received was higher.
The cases in which a value is hidden are configured as omission of income and make the IRS suspicious of the document, placing that declaration under analysis.
Taxpayers often include their dependents in the statement to increase IR deductions or the refund amount. However, it is important to remember to report their income.
“Let’s say you have a son who did a job at the mall and he received income. When you put this in his statement in addition to his medical expenses, you have to put the income he also received ”, exemplifies José Carlos, from the Federal Revenue Service.
Medical expenses
The Federal Revenue is extremely strict with information related to health expenses, since the amounts can be fully deducted from the calculation of the Income Tax.
Therefore, taxpayers need to be careful to inform the correct values in the document.
There are cases in which some medical deduction within the statement does not match that of a third party, or even data that does not match the taxpayers’ parameters, leading the revenue to suspect and analyze whether the payment actually existed.
Errors of this type correspond to 21.7% of irregularities within the fine mesh.
Within the problems related to medical expenses, it is possible to classify another issue: health plans.
According to José Carlos, a very common mistake is to deduct the payment of the health plan of a distant relative.
“For example, you have a son and a nephew and you pay for their health insurance, but your nephew is not your Income Tax dependent. You cannot deduct that amount.”
Withholding tax higher than reported by paying sources
The Withholding Income Tax (IRRF) is a monthly discount that the Federal Revenue applies directly to taxpayers’ salaries.
About 18.6% of the errors within the fine mesh correspond to irregularities in the amounts of withholding tax reported by the parties.
For example, when receiving income, the taxpayer needs to inform the amount, but the amount that arrives for the Revenue is not the same given by the company.
In these cases, the declaration is stopped for analysis, since one of the two pieces of information may be wrong, that of the paying source or the taxpayer himself who made a mistake when filling it out.
pre-filled statement
To prevent these common mistakes from recurring, the Federal Revenue has the pre-filled declaration.
When making the declaration using the pre-filled option, the taxpayer already starts with several complete fields, such as information on income, deductions, assets, real estate and medical services, which are imported from the declarations of the previous year.
The mechanism serves as a facilitator of the process, giving the citizen only the responsibility of checking the information. If something is wrong, just change the data to the correct information.
“It’s a way of disclosing to society and taxpayers the information we have about him so that he can check it out and not have the trouble of reviewing it all”, says José Carlos.
With information from CNN Brazil