The head of the General Administration of Customs (AGA), Guillermo Michel, clarified that the financial information exchange agreement with the United States, although it began to take effect this year, “allows going up to 2018” retroactively.
In this way, the Federal Administration of Public Revenues (AFIP) will be able to access financial information of Argentine citizens through the US tax administration (IRS), retroactively until 2018, with the aim of detecting possible cases of tax evasion.
The new financial information agreement that Argentina signed with the United States entered into force on January 1, 2023 and will allow the AFIP to access financial information on Argentine citizens “at a massive level” to establish risk profiles that “arise suspicions of evasion “.
This new agreement, framed in the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Law (FATCA), together with a previous bilateral agreement, makes tax information available to the Argentine treasury from 2018 onwards.
“This is because, prior to the IGA – for the acronym in English: Intergovernmental Agreement – initialed on December 5, 2022, Argentina already had another Agreement with the North American country, by virtue of which it could exchange information on a case-by-case basis. “, said the official statement of AFIP.
Therefore, the conjunction of the two agreements gives AFIP much greater access to data than it previously had.
In this context, Michel stressed that Argentina has a very important network for the exchange of information, “which makes our country’s tax information transparent,” he said in statements to CNN Radio.
In addition, he added that the country is currently “obtaining information from 68 taxpayers” and is working to “request information within the framework of the second scheme,” reported the head of AGA.
In this sense, the validity of both agreements consists in identifying groups of Argentine taxpayers whose characteristics allow us to infer that they have mirror accounts in the US.
“That is, to identify a group of Argentine taxpayers with a certain characteristic. There are many Argentines who, when they opened their account in the United States, opened two accounts: the declared A account and the undeclared mirror account B,” the official said.
In another order, Michel elaborated on the impact of the dollar on imports and pointed out that the “power” gap “is the origin of the problem” consisting of a scheme of “over-invoicing imports or under-invoicing exports.”
“The minister (of Economy, Sergio Massa) also agrees on this, who is the one who raised from the beginning of his administration an issue related to the ordering of public accounts and the ordering of foreign trade,” he concludes.
