Overview

• The Consell de Govern approved a decree on July 22 creating the commissioner role and a five-member advisory council to modernize the Agència Tributària de Catalunya.
• Santiago Ramón Arizón, IBM’s tax projects director for Spain, Portugal and Greece, was appointed commissioner to coordinate all regional financing policies and report to the Economy Department.
• The advisory council will diagnose current capacities, design a deployment plan and guide legal, technical and organizational reforms ahead of IRPF collection in 2026.
• The revamped treasury aims to expand annual tax management from €5 billion to as much as €30 billion, including taking on full IRPF receipts next year.
• Officials have flagged critical IT and staffing shortfalls at the ATC—with no in-house IT personnel compared to 1,500 at Spain’s central tax agency—as a priority for the agency’s scale-up.