The Ministry of Finance is proposing to sign a 7.5 billion euro service provider payment plan by the end of this month. It would be the third payment plan of this kind since 2012, and the Ministry wants it to be the last so that the government can say goodbye to its bad habit of filing away invoices instead of paying them. Achieving this goal will depend on the Ministry of Finance's ability to enforce the new plan and compliance from the regional governments who are responsible for the majority of these delayed payments.
Under the first two plans, regional governments paid nearly 4 million pending invoices to 43,699 service providers for a total of 18.64 billion euros in previously unpaid bills. These figures show just how many bills were going unpaid since the crisis began. The glaring negligence from Spain's public administrations forced many companies to shut down or get very close.
Non-payments across the national economy continue to stymie a recovery, and extended payment terms (they were recently reduced from 157 days to 127 days) are still very far from the EU's requirement that companies get paid within 30 days. Of course, these payment plans are a viable solution, but service providers fear that
If a company has to wait for a year to receive payments, it runs the risk of going bankrupt. If somehow the company manages to stay alive, it likely misses out on key business opportunities. Even the multinationals, which have sufficient cash savings, are losing their competitive edge compared to their counterparts in other countries. We have gone two years without solving the Public Administrations' inability to pay service providers on time, so this "final" plan may not be the last that the Finance Ministry has to come up with.