The Tax Reform of President Gustav Petro was approved in the Senate of the Republic, after more than 12 hours of debate. Although the text had some changes, most of the articles passed without major opposition.
How were the taxes?
Sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods
Bread, milk, wafers and the Veleño sandwich were saved and will not have any type of tax.
While the sugary drinks will be taxed, but this will begin to govern from July 2023, while for ultra-processed foods it will begin to be charged from September of next year.
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For sugary drinks the tax will be for drinks that have more than six grams of sugar per 100 milliliters.
church tax
For its part, the 20% income tax on commercial activities of churches was dropped. After a heated debate, the senators decided to remove this article from the final text.
Mining-energy sector
These taxes did not have any change with respect to the text proposed in the paper for the second debate.
In that sense, the surtax for oil companies will be calculated according to the behavior of the international price of crude oil, and will range from 5% to 15%, starting from 67 dollars per barrel.
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In other words, if the international price of oil is below that threshold, no surtax on income will be charged to the oil companies.
For its part, hydroelectric plants will also have a temporary surcharge of 3 points.
Financial sector
The rent surcharge of five percentage points was approvedThis will be temporary for five years.
Jail for evaders
In the case of the greater penalties for tax evaders, it was agreed that it will not be until the second recidivism that there will be jail for taxpayers.
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In that sense, If a person evades more than one billion, the first time he commits the crime he must pay the amount evaded, the second time he will have to pay and also pay a penalty, and the third time he is caught evading, he will have to pay the amount and now he will have to pay jail time. The penalties range from 4 to 9 years in prison.
pensions
As President Gustavo Petro had announced, high pensions will not be taxed. However, in the text of the paper an exemption had been included for those people who had pension savings abroad and wanted to bring said savings. However, this article was dropped despite the intervention of Finance Minister José Antonio Ocampo on his behalf.
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Wealth tax
The estate tax rates will start from 0.5% for amounts greater than $3,000 million, it will go up to 1.5%, temporarily, for assets that exceed $10 billion.
The House of Representatives still needs to approve the text in its entirety, because before adjournment, 52 articles had been approved.
The session will resume this Thursday from 8 am.
