:I accept the "blame" for citing Bello, and I agree a fresher source would be preferable.  What's the modern counterpart, prescriptive, for the Americas?  I googled "el año pasado he" and got 317,000 hits.  Granted, about half of the first 20 are false positives (with punctuation or other clausal boundary before "he"), but there remain many instances of the compound tense with "el año pasado".  I would yield to the expertise of others on this whole verb-tense question, if it's based on good data.