Classification of social and improvement tax contributions

Tax contributions are divided into improvement contributions and social security contributions. Improvement contributions are those that increase the value of a property of a private individual. It is the obligatory payment to the State or Public Entity on the occasion of the execution of a work for general utility purposes and which increases the value of the real estate of a private individual.

As for social security contributions, they are those that pursue a social purpose and are the levies made by certain public or semi-public organizations on their users, to ensure their autonomous operation.

It is considered that the pecuniary benefits in favor of non-territorial public institutional entities are configured by their coercive nature as any other fiscal tax, without any relevance for defining the notion of parafiscality in terms of budgetary figures or a certain form of accounting.

Such taxes are qualified as special taxes, but the truth is that such entities may also demand special rates and contributions, in many cases performing a kind of osmosis between public law and private law, which requires a careful examination of each contribution.

In this sense, these contributions can be considered as true taxes, since the benefit of the tax is distributed over the collectivity as a whole, and in the parafiscal contribution, the benefit is for a professionally or socially delimited group.