The inactive draft of the General State Budget (PGE) 2022 seems to need some adjustments or amendments prior to its knowledge and approval in Congress, due to changes in factors that should affect the projected income and expenses of next year.
Although it was designed without direct links to possible variations in the tax structure, its submission to the Legislative Power coincided with the moment when it was debated whether the Government would present a tax reform, of which unofficial versions were even circulating. Finally, President Luis Abinader announced to the country that he would not present the tax reform.
However, in the legislative environment there is the idea that the 2022 Budget project needs definitions of support. The spokesman for the disputed People’s Force, Rubén Maldonado, said last Tuesday that the project is stalled. “Certainly, knowledge of the budget is stagnant, only one meeting has been held … let’s hope that the president of the commission will convene it. They should not be waiting where the resources are going to come from because that budget is supposed to contain all that scaffolding, but obviously that is part of improvisation, inexperience and the errors that the Government has permanently been committing in the management of the public thing ”.
To finance the proposed budget, for more than one trillion, 46 thousand million is pesos, the Ministry of Finance has outlined the main aspects of the tax revenue policy “taking into consideration a set of improvements in the performance of the collection agencies with the purpose of covering public spending, honoring national and international financial commitments, as well as continuing to face the health crisis and the various social, environmental, and physical infrastructure commitments of the country, among others ”. He argues that “as of September 2020, with the change of government authorities, there was a significant turning point in the collection of public revenues, which allowed the capture of more resources.
Likewise, there was a greater confidence of importers and taxpayers when paying their respective taxes on international purchases from the local market. This is evidenced by the growth in income, excluding donations, in 2021 compared to 2019, which increased by 22.3%, and with those in 2020 with a positive variation that reached 27.4% ”.
Estimates subsequent to the design of the Budget 2022 project, whose structuring began at the beginning of the second semester, point to higher growth. Due to this variation, the Government proposed a second modification to the PGE 2021, with an increase in internal income for more than RD $ 63,000 million.
The fiscal authorities expect this trend to continue in 2022. An issue not considered in next year’s PGE project is the expected average price of oil, originally projected at around US $ 62.00 a barrel, but due to the resistance to the downside , could be greater.
