The President of the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF), Cristina Herrero, took part today in the conference on tax collection organised by the State Tax Administration Agency (AEAT) in Zaragoza. She highlighted the close collaboration between the two bodies, which is essential for AIReF to carry out its supervision and evaluation functions.
Cristina Herrero began by explaining the origin and mission of AIReF, an institution set up in 2013 to oversee the sustainability of public finances. It was set up as an independent fiscal supervisor with functional autonomy vis-à-vis the supervised party, and since 2017 it has also been performing an important public policy evaluation function.
AIReF maintains close collaboration with the AEAT through several agreements. On the one hand, an agreement was signed in May 2019 for the exchange of statistical information for the purposes of fiscal supervision. On the other hand, ad hoc agreements are being promoted to access detailed and anonymised information that is key to the evaluation of public policies.
According to Cristina Herrero, tax information is essential for AIReF to be able to carry out its fiscal supervision function, which takes the form of continuous monitoring of the budgetary cycle, the preparation of short- and medium-term forecasts and the preparation of long-term projections. To make these forecasts, AIReF has developed its own forecasting models for the main forms of tax revenue and, in an exercise of transparency and self-assessment, it analyses the ex post errors made.
On November 5th, AIReF published the reports on the Medium-Term Fiscal and Structural Plan 2025-2028 and on the Main Lines of the Budget of the GG for 2025, in which it updated its macroeconomic and budgetary forecasts for 2024 and 2025 and its medium-term macroeconomic and budgetary forecasts up to 2029. It also included a disaggregated analysis of the evolution of revenue from 2019 to 2029.
In the longer term, AIReF published its latest projections in the Opinion on the Long-term Sustainability of the General Government in March 2023, which AIReF plans to update in 2025.
Furthermore, AIReF carries out specific analyses of revenues, such as the Technical Document on the variability of tax revenue in which it breaks down the factors that have been conducive to the extraordinary dynamism of revenue since 2019. The first analysis was published in 2023, which was updated in July 2024.
To conclude, Cristina Herrero underlined the value of the AEAT information for the drafting of the studies in AIReF’s Public Expenditure Evaluation Division. Specifically, she referred to the study on tax benefits that is part of the review process of expenditure known as the Spending Review and the evaluation of the MIS, in which it developed a microsimulator that makes it possible to obtain the number of households that would potentially be beneficiaries of this benefit, thanks to the microdata supplied by the AEAT.
