Spain tax confusion over €20 mystery shopper pay

Mystery shopper for €20: the tax mess nobody clears up

Can Hacienda (Spain's tax agency) come after you for €20? That's the doubt for someone with a regular job who also does visits as a mystery shopper, a formula where a company pays someone to evaluate from inside the quality of a shop or entity. The case is textbook: a person who in 2012 worked in Spain, who now lives in Wales and doesn't know if that income affects their income tax return, whether they need to register as self-employed, or in which box to put it. They were paid, literally, just over twenty euros.

Do you have to register as self-employed for minimal income?

No official threshold appears in the exchange. What is repeated is the suspicion that a minimum exists, that occasional collaborations can be paid without setting up as a 'company', and that only from a certain turnover would you need to legalize as self-employed. The figure thrown out —€2,500, and informally— comes from no rule: it works as a caricature of how tiny the case is. That is, some take for granted that the amount is irrelevant and nobody gets right what the real border is.

Commercial contract: why the company denies an employment relationship

The company's response is blunt: it maintains there is no employment relationship, but an external and sporadic collaboration, presented as a gratuity. This is the scheme identified as a commercial contract. Someone working this way has no Social Security contributions paid by the contractor, no right to unemployment benefit, no sick leave. And yet, it would be reflected in Hacienda: according to one participant, withholding tax would be applied to those payments. The doubt left floating is under what concept the company itself declares them, with the hypothesis that they are recorded as payments to collaborators, just like paying a supplier.

The exclusion from the Statute invoked to avoid hiring

The legal fit pointed to is article 1.3.d of the Workers' Statute, which excludes from its scope work done on grounds of friendship, benevolence or good neighborliness. The reading of the episode: the company carefully chooses its vocabulary —gratuity, never salary— to shield itself against a claim for registration in the General Regime. Someone may have tried before and failed; the matter stays right there, unresolved.

So what to do with that €20?

The first advice is to ask the company for the withholding certificate and take the opportunity to ask under what concept those payments were made and whether they had withholding. With a regular paycheck covering the rest of the year, the general feeling is that €20 doesn't move any box. And if there's time left, someone adds, as consolation, that they were withheld the same for doing occasional sociological surveys.

The most repeated conclusion, among jokes about gold chains and bills found in the street, is that worrying about that amount says much more about antiestéticar of Hacienda than about tax obligation. The exact box, though, still doesn't appear anywhere.