Within a long list, there is a chapter dedicated to the consumer tax benefits that are framed within the Financial Inclusion Law. Although the figures are not significant in comparison to other items and to the total number of services provided, some of the problems raised draw attention and denote a certain lack of knowledge on the part of consumers.
Official data shows that in 2022 there were consumers who They again claimed for the requirement of minimum amounts for purchases with a debit card. That happened 32 times, even though it is a practice enabled since 2020 by the law of Urgent Consideration, which repealed Article 64 of the Financial Inclusion Law. In this way, businesses that use electronic payment methods are no longer obliged to accept operations for any amount. That requirement had been implemented in January 2017.
Today, in practice, any merchant who works with cards can set the minimum amount, which is at their discretion. That is why it should not be surprising that when you go to the neighborhood kiosk or store and want to pay with a card for a small purchase of $100 or $200, the merchant does not accept it because it has a higher floor amount for its use. In 2020, with the legal change still fresh, there were 78 queries of this type, and in 2021 there had been 43.
Another practice that consumers denounced was the discrimination between paying in cash and paying with debit. This happened 18 times last year. As in the previous case, when article 64 of the Financial Inclusion Law was repealed The prohibition to apply differential prices between cash and payment with cash electronic means in force since 2014 was eliminated.
In its original wording, Law 19,210 established that providers or businesses that decided to accept debit cards or electronic money instruments (prepaid cards or food tickets) they could not charge for products or services that offered a higher price if the payment was made through these instruments than if it was made with cash. It also established that any promotion that offered benefits -monetary or not- to consumers paying in cash should be extended to payments made with plastic.
Today there is no rule that obliges the merchant to put the same prices between the different methods of cash payment, and the owner of the business is free to mark differences if he considers it necessary within his business. Neither is he obliged to generalize a promotion to all means of payment.
In addition, in the area of consumer tax benefits, There were other queries such as the “non-application of the discounts established by law”, and for less than the legal discount with a debit card (today there are 2 VAT points). There were also inquiries in which the problem raised was “accumulation of discounts” and there were even consumers who made inquiries regarding businesses that did not have a POS.
Meanwhile, there were inquiries related to VAT discounts in restaurants and the like (today there are 9 VAT points according to Law 17,934). In this chapter, the most repeated problem was that the business involved did not apply the discount.
