Capital Gains Tax Returns

Stock exchange gains, dividends, bond interest, the sale of shares in a company or income from cryptocurrencies are mostly subject to a 19% capital gains tax, commonly called the Belka tax. In theory this might seem one of the simpler settlements. In practice a number of issues arise which are easy to overlook without the right knowledge and which may attract the attention of the tax authorities.

Where do problems most often appear?

1. Settling losses – a loss incurred in a given tax year can be deducted from profits over the following five years, but only within the same source of income. Few people make full use of this mechanism.
2. Foreign brokerage accounts – income from foreign investment platforms is not automatically settled by the broker. The obligation to file the PIT-38 return and pay the tax rests solely with the investor.
3. Foreign dividends – depending on the country, dividend payments may be subject to withholding tax (WHT), which can be partly deducted in Poland under double taxation treaties.
4. Cryptocurrencies – settled separately from other capital gains, under different rules and with different possibilities for deducting costs.
5. Sale of shares in non-public companies – requires a separate valuation and documentation of acquisition costs, without which the tax office may challenge the amount of income.

What do we do?

We analyse all sources of capital gains, verify the possibility of deducting losses from previous years, determine the correct exchange rates for foreign transactions and prepare the PIT-38 together with the necessary attachments. Where a double taxation treaty applies, we check whether tax paid abroad can be deducted in Poland.

Result: a correctly filed return, full use of the deductions available to you and certainty that no source of capital income has been missed or wrongly classified.