The National Statistics Institute (INE) survey released today, that looks at the use of information and communication technologies in families, reveals that more than 45% of Portuguese ask another person to deliver their digital tax return to the Tax Authority for them. Adding that more than half of the 6,594 families surveyed assume that they have encountered at least one problem accessing a public authority website in the last 12 months.

According to INE, only 29.1% of respondents assume that they went to the Finance Portal to hand in their own tax return, with 45.7% saying that the digital declaration was delivered by someone else, without specifying whether a family member, friend or even an accountant was asked.

As the INE survey covered behaviour over the last 12 months, 1.8% of respondents said they submitted their tax return on paper. As of this year it is no longer possible to hand in your tax return on paper. There was also 1.3% of respondents who submitted their personal income tax return automatically, "without any intervention from another person or third parties".

The highest proportion of people (37.9%) filing their tax return online was in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, with the lowest percentage (23.1%) being found in the North Region.

The survey also revealed that more than two thirds of respondents (68.7%) have used the internet or mobile applications to access information from public bodies, mainly to consult personal information (53% of responses). However, more than half of the respondents (52.2%) experienced at least one problem. "The most frequently mentioned problems were technical problems in the functioning of websites or applications (36.6%) or the fact that these websites were difficult to use (33.8%)," INE writes in the report.