The Generalitat appoints a commissioner to deploy the Catalan Treasury

The Governing Council will approve the creation of the commissioner for the deployment of the Catalan Treasury in its session this morning. At the same time, it will also establish an advisory council. Both measures are included in a decree that will be published today.

To fill the position of commissioner, the Generalitat (Catalan Government) has appointed Santiago Ramón Arizón, who previously held the position of project director at IBM. Ramón, who holds a degree in engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, specializes in the firm's tax practice for Spain, Portugal, and Greece.

The Government appoints an IBM executive, Santiago Ramón Arizón, to assume this new position.

The commissioner's task will be to promote, coordinate, and monitor all policies related to regional financing. The commissioner will report to the head of the Department of Economy. The creation of this position and the advisory council is the result of the agreements reached with the Republican Left for the development of the new financing system.

Last week, the central government and the Generalitat (Catalan regional government) signed an agreement in which both administrations embrace the spirit of the investiture pact reached between the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) and ERC (Spanish Regional Government). This agreement committed the executive branch to developing a new financing system inspired by the economic agreement system and recognizing Catalonia's unique financial characteristics. It also included the application of the principle of ordinality, which would prevent Catalonia, as the third largest net contributor among the autonomous communities, from becoming the ninth largest in the contributions it receives from the State on account of the taxes paid by Catalans.

This agreement requires a thorough review of the current legal, technical, and professional structure of the entire Catalan Treasury, not just the Catalan Tax Agency, and this is where the appointment of the commissioner makes sense.

According to the decree's explanatory memorandum, the commissioner's position allows for a specific body that "can act transversally" in all areas of the administration affected by this virtual reinvention of the system.

As the Minister of Economy, Alícia Romero, pointed out in the interview published by La Vanguardia last Sunday, the current structure of the Tax Agency does not allow for the management of a tax as large as personal income tax. The Minister pointed out, for example, that the ATC currently has no IT staff, while the Spanish Tax Agency has an army of 1,500 IT staff.

But if this is a problem that can be resolved in the medium term, what is much more complex is that the Catalan tax system currently lacks sufficient knowledge to manage a tax as complex as personal income tax, which, according to the agreement signed between the PSC and ERC, should begin to be collected from Catalonia in 2026.