Sergio runs a language academy in Alicante as a self-employed person, with four teachers on employment contracts and a translator who invoices him. In May 2026, two of his teachers told him that their draft income tax return showed tax to pay. The 2025 Modelo 190 filed by his advisory firm had the four teachers under the code for professional activities instead of the one for employees, and one of them with a tax number (NIF) with two digits swapped. The translator, on the other hand, appeared as if she were an employee. Nobody at the academy had looked at the summary: the adviser filed it every January and Sergio paid the bill.
As far as the Agencia Tributaria, the Spanish tax agency, is concerned, the 190 is Sergio's and so are the mistakes. The good part is that the 190 is relatively easy to correct; the delicate part is that every day it takes, his employees' income tax returns are wrong. The general picture of the obligations of a self-employed person with staff is on self-employed in Spain.
Which mistakes are serious and which are formal
| Mistake in the 190 | Who it harms | How it is fixed |
|---|---|---|
| Wrong tax number for a recipient | The recipient: they do not see their withholding in the draft return | Supplementary or replacement return with the correct tax number |
| Wrong payment code (employment instead of business income, or the other way round) | The recipient: their return classifies the income wrongly | Replacement return with the correct codes |
| Withholding amount different from what was paid in with the 111s | The person who withheld: it triggers a check | Review the 111 first; then the 190 |
| Recipient left out | That recipient | Supplementary return adding only the missing record |
| Recipient included who should not be there | That recipient and the person who withheld | Replacement return without that record |
| 190 not filed | Everyone | File it; see I forgot to file Modelo 190 |
Supplementary or replacement
The 190 allows both. A supplementary return adds missing records without touching those already filed; a replacement return replaces the whole return, so it has to contain all the recipients, both the correct ones and the corrected ones. If Sergio's needs codes and a tax number changed, the clean route is a complete replacement return: a supplementary one does not delete the record with the wrong tax number, which would go on attributing income to someone it does not belong to.
What it may cost Sergio
Filing an information return with inaccurate or false data is a different offence from not filing it: the one in article 199 of the Ley General Tributaria, the General Tax Act, with fixed fines per item of data or fines proportional to the amount wrongly declared, depending on the type of data, and without the automatic reduction that voluntary late filing enjoys. What amount would apply in each case depends on how the mistake is classified, and that is something checked in the decision itself if the Agencia Tributaria does open a file. What is clear is the direction: correcting before any formal request is what gives the best protection.
As a guide to the scale of the problem:
- Records affected: five (four teachers with the wrong code, one of them also with the wrong tax number, and the translator under the employment code).
- Withholdings affected: the 4 teachers add up to €9,600 withheld during the year; the translator, €1,350. Total wrongly declared: €10,950.
- Tax still to be paid in: none, if the 111s were right. The mistake is one of information, not of payment.
- Cost of fixing it now: a replacement return and five new certificates. Cost of not doing so: five wrong draft income tax returns and, foreseeably, five formal requests to recipients that will end up pointing at Sergio.
If you would like us to review yours before the income tax campaign starts, tell us about it in the self-employed form.
Who answers to the tax office and who answers to you
The person obliged to file the 190 is the one who withholds (article 108 of the IRPF Regulation, IRPF being the personal income tax). The fact that the procedure was carried out by an advisory firm holding a power of attorney or acting as an authorised filing agent (colaborador social) does not shift the responsibility: the return is yours, and if there is a fine it is imposed on you. The Agencia Tributaria does not look into what happened within your relationship with the adviser.
The professional's liability runs through civil law. If they undertook to file your 190 with the data you gave them and did it wrongly, they breached the engagement, and article 1101 of the Código Civil, the Civil Code, allows you to claim damages from them. The time limit for that claim is the general five years in article 1964.2. Usually the professional has liability insurance, and the insurer is the one that pays, if the claim succeeds and the policy covers it.
Where the mistake started: the data the advisory firm received
The mistake often does not originate with the adviser, but in the data they were sent. If the academy sent a list without tax numbers, or with the translator included among the staff, the mistake may have been made by whoever prepared that list. Before claiming against anyone, you need to reconstruct what data was sent, when and in what format. A claim supported by an email containing the correct data is a very different thing from one supported by memory.
The second point is that your recipients also have something to do. Once the 190 is corrected, their tax data is updated, but if any of them has already filed their return with the missing withholding, they may have to rectify it. Let them know in writing and give them the new certificate.
When the mistake goes back to earlier years
If, on reviewing the 2025 190, you discover that the codes were also wrong in those for 2023 and 2024, the fix is the same, year by year: a replacement return for each affected year that is not time-barred. The temptation is to correct only the latest one, because it is the one causing phone calls, but recipients whose returns for earlier years are wrongly classified remain exposed to a check. And in the claim against the adviser, each year with a mistake is a separate breach of the engagement, with its own documentation.
How to document the adviser's mistake
- The engagement letter or the email in which they agreed to handle your information returns.
- The lists of staff and collaborators you sent them, with their dates.
- The 190 as filed, with the receipt showing who filed it.
- Your 111s for the year, to show that the underlying amounts were correct.
- Any penalty decision, which is what quantifies the damage.
One last useful point: the filing receipt for the 190 shows the tax number of whoever filed it. If the advisory firm acted as an authorised filing agent or under your power of attorney, that is recorded and helps to show, as against the professional, that the return came from their office and not from you. Download it from the online office and keep it with the rest of the file.
Ask them in writing to file the replacement return within a specific period, or have another professional make the correction. Every week the 190 stays wrong is another week in which a recipient may receive a formal request, and the Agencia Tributaria may get in ahead of your correction, which is what turns a fixable mistake into a penalty.
Sergio filed the replacement return in June, with the correct codes and tax number, gave new certificates to his five recipients and kept the list he had sent in January, which was correct. If the Agencia Tributaria imposes a fine, he will know exactly where the mistake came from. We cannot promise that it will not impose one or what the insurer will decide; what we can say is that the documentation is already prepared. If what worries you is a mistake in the income tax return rather than in the summary, we explain it in my adviser got my income tax return wrong.