THE WAYPOINT SUR
No alerts for me, thank you.
The letterbox that doesn't take holidays
The audit season continues: all summer we are re-checking our own reporting, piece by piece. In March we told you Spain moved your letterbox without telling you: official government mail stopped arriving at your door years ago and now lands in DEHú — Spain's unified electronic government inbox, where a tax demand, a traffic fine, or a contribution notice counts as legally delivered ten days after posting, opened or not. The floor for missing a requerimiento — formal information request is a €150 penalty; the ceiling involves surcharges up to 20% and a settlement that becomes final without you.
That piece holds up, mostly. Today we mark its homework, because August is the month its subject matters most, and because the advice we gave in March has aged in two directions at once.
What held, and what we got wrong
The system works exactly as described. The ten-day clock runs in calendar days, the escalation ladder (portal, then the public judicial notice board, then the state gazette) grinds on schedule, and none of it pauses for summer. Your holiday is not a legal state Spain recognises. Neither, for that matter, is Spain's own: the offices empty in August, but the posting servers do not.
Our fix aged badly, and we found that out ourselves. In March we told you to grant your gestor a digital apoderamiento — power of attorney over your government mailbox. Correct in principle. Then in July we investigated how that system actually behaves and found the rails barely work end-to-end, which is why many firms quietly hold clients' digital certificates and act as them instead, an arrangement that makes everything done with your certificate legally yours. So the March advice stands as a destination and fails as a route. The honest replacement is below.
And one for the blooper reel: the March piece went out on a Monday, signed "Enjoy the weekend." Nobody wrote in. We check the sign-offs now.
Absence is a setting
Here is the update that changes what you do this month. Spain's notification system assumes you are permanently reachable. It turns out the state knows this is sometimes false, and built a switch for it, on one lane: the días de cortesía — courtesy days. Anyone in the mandatory electronic-notification system, or voluntarily subscribed, can block up to 30 natural days per calendar year during which the Agencia Tributaria cannot post to their mailbox. Verified August 2026 against the AEAT sede. If this is the first you have heard of them, you are in the majority: in nine months of covering what the autónomo — self-employed worker system takes, this is our first word on what it quietly gives back, and it is not the only benefit hiding in there. We are working on the full list.
The mechanics have teeth. You must request the days at least seven natural days before they start, online only, signed with your certificado digital — digital identity certificate, DNIe, or Cl@ve. Ask today, and your cover starts in the middle of next week; the family leaving on Friday needed to ask last week. And the switch is narrow: DGT fines, Seguridad Social demands, court papers, and town-hall notices have no courtesy regime at all. Their clocks run while you are on the beach, which is exactly why the March piece's core advice survives its own audit: the email alerts and the portal check are the only cover the other lanes offer.
So the competent shape of an August absence now has three configured parts. The mailbox checked before you leave, because courtesy days pause new postings, not clocks already running. The tax lane switched off for the days you are away, if you asked a week ahead. And alerts on for everything else, with the updated setup guide covering all three steps, courtesy days included, re-verified this week.
What to do before you travel
Log into DEHú and clear anything pending. Ten-day clocks already running do not care about your booking confirmation.
If you are in the tax system as an autónomo, a company administrator, or a non-resident landlord filing through the electronic system, claim your courtesy days now for the second half of August: seven days' notice means this week's request covers next week's travel.
Leave the email alerts on and have one way to act remotely (your certificate on your own laptop, not on your gestor's desk). If you never set a certificate up, the identity step can be done in person at the Agencia Tributaria's Málaga or Marbella offices, and setup takes about ten minutes once you have it. If a notification lands anyway and the clock is short, the missed-notification guide covers the first 24 hours.
You pick the next audit
The season keeps slots open for reader picks, and starting today that vote is one tap instead of a reply. Choose below; "something else" plus a reply still works.
Which piece should we re-audit next?
Spanish-lite
Quiero solicitar mis días de cortesía. — I want to request my courtesy days. The sentence that makes your holiday official in the only system that offers it.
¿Hay algo pendiente en mi buzón? — Is there anything pending in my mailbox? The question for whoever holds any access to your notifications, before you travel, not after.
The bottom line
March's diagnosis holds: the letterbox moved, the clocks are automated, and nobody is watching it for you by default. What the audit adds is the configuration layer we missed: Spain assumes you never leave, and gives you exactly 30 days a year to tell it otherwise, on the tax lane only, a week in advance. Claim them, clear the mailbox, leave the alerts on. The €150 penalty is still the cheap version of this lesson, and this month it is also the most avoidable.
Onwards — A. and the WaypointSur team, dreaming of being out of office, and officially configured.
