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Portugal — Orbitax Country Chapters
6.2. Main Differences between Commercial and Tax Accounting

Tax law provides for various rules with deviate from the accounting treatment. Some of the deviations are:

  • the fair value model for financial instruments, whose return is recognized as income, is only accepted for tax purposes if the reliability of the determination of fair value is, in principle, guaranteed, excluding equity instruments that do not have a price formed on a regulated market;
  • Impairment losses are tax deductible regarding credits and exceptional depreciations related to tangible assets, non-consumable biological assets, investment properties, arising from properly demonstrated causes; in other cases, the tax relevance occurs only upon the effective realization;
  • the result of the disposal of assets is subject to the capital gains regime, so such result differs from the result of the accounting clearance.