The ARBA (Collection Agency of Buenos Aires) and the AFIP (Federal Public Revenue Administration) carried out inspection and oversight activities in seven hypermarkets in the province of Buenos Aires.
During the inspection work, the organism found that the hypermarkets falsified aliquots in their sworn statements from 2018 to 2022, to “evade more than $6,000 million,” as detailed by the ARBA.
The executive director of the ARBACristian Girard, explained that the supermarkets carried out an evasion “in concept of Gross Income in operations for the sale of meat to consumers”.
For this reason, the agency will initiate legal action against commercial establishments, within the framework of the inspections carried out by the entity since the middle of the year, on the entire food chain, from companies that produce mass consumption products to supermarkets.
Evasion maneuvers were detected in: La Anónima, Coto, Toledo, Makro, Cencosud, Carrefour and Changomás. Girard stressed that these are “actions that seek to repair injustices in the context of an inflationary context and rising food prices.”
And he explained: “We detected an evasion maneuver by supermarkets, which evaded $1,500 million. If the affidavits of supermarkets for the years 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and so far in 2022 are analyzed, that amount reaches $6,000 million “.
In this context, the owner of the ARBA He stressed that the macrismo “lowered the rate for butchers by half: from 5 to 2.5” and specified that “supermarkets began to declare the sale of meat as if they were retail butchers.”
What will happen to supermarkets
Girard explained that last Monday the relevant notifications were sent to the supermarket chains involved, so now those companies have a period of 10 business days to discharge them, at which time the organism may make “the determination ex officio”.
“An executive title is issued and we are evaluating criminal actions because clearly there is a ruse, a maneuver to generate damage to the treasury for $6,000 million. These are resources that the province did not have and that we want to recover because it is money with which we could build houses, blocks of pavement or invest in schools, which are the priorities of the Government of Axel Kicillof”, he indicated.