Tax statement/proof of self employment for bank

[lulubel]

I hope this is the right place to post this.

My partner and I opened non-resident accounts with Unicaja a couple of weeks ago. (We are actually intending to become permanently resident, but thought it made sense to wait until January to do that, since we're still fiscal residents of the UK for this year.)

The bank is asking us for a copy of a tax declaration to prove we're self employed, and we're not really sure what to give them, or even exactly what it is they want.

Our business has only been running since May this year, so we haven't paid any tax yet, and in fact won't have to until we complete our UK tax returns for the 2009/10 tax year in January 2011. So we don't have any kind of tax declaration that relates to our self employment. The only things we have related to tax are my P60 from April this year, and my partner's P45 from when she left her last job in October last year. We don't have any accounts yet, and we haven't employed an accountant as we intended to do the accounts ourselves and get them checked by my father, who is a retired accountant. (Now that we're in Spain we'll be employing an accountant from next year when we become resident since none of us is familar with the spanish system.)

What are we expected to give them?

As far as I'm aware, we completed a declaration of fiscal non-residence, and have applied for NIE numbers which we'll hopefully be able to collect this week.

We're at a bit of a loss and really don't want our accounts frozen.

[Jool]

Are you applying for a mortgage or loan from your bank? If not then I don´t know why they need this information from you? Do you?

[lulubel]

Hi jool. No, I don't know why they need the information. At first I thought they wanted something to prove we paid tax outside Spain, which seemed reasonable enough to me, but that was until I read about the declaration of fiscal non-residence. (When I say we signed those when we opened the accounts, I'm assuming we did. We signed a lot of forms, and I can't remember what they were all for.)

As far as I can understand it, as long as we're UK fiscal residents, where our money comes from and what we do with it should be irrelevant to Spain. On the other hand, we've got nothing to hide, and it wouldn't bother me to provide evidence of our business activities, if we had any to provide.

Sorry, forgot to say, we're not applying for a mortgage, credit cards or loans of any kind. They're just basic bank accounts with Maestro cards.

[Beachcomber]

Are you working here as autónomo (self employed)? If you so you should have copies of quarterly tax returns for the second and third quarters of the year on forms 130. This should be sufficient for the bank.

However, if you are working you should not have a non-resident bank account and should not have certificates of fiscal non-residence.

[lulubel]

Hi beachcomber, thanks for your reply.

We only arrived in Spain on October 16th, and had been running our business from the UK for the year until then, so our understanding was that for 2009 we were fiscal residents of the UK (under the UK's 3-months law and Spain's 6-months law). Hence fiscal non-residency for Spain.

We plan to spend the whole of 2010 (and the foreseeable future) in Spain, so assumed we would need to complete the relevant forms and register as autonomo next year, and at that point become resident.

So, we haven't been in Spain long enough to have paid tax here, and the business hasn't been running long enough for us to have paid tax yet in the UK.

The only reason we opened the bank accounts when we did was to try and do everything correctly (we've been paying for everything in cash) and now it seems it's been more trouble than it's worth.