According to officials communicated to heads of business chambers, they seek to clean the registry of importers. The most affected sectors
Winds of change blow for him Commerce Exterior. In parallel to the new monitoring measures, such as the expansion of the universe of Non-Automatic Licenses, with 300 new tariff positions, the Government is focusing part of its efforts on a new objective: to prevent the outflow of dollars from the hands of shell companies and unreliable operators.
As I anticipated iProfessionalThis was made known to the Chamber of Importers by the Industry Secretariat, within the framework of a meeting that took place on Thursday afternoon.
During the summit, in which officials from the Export Directorate and the External Commercial Management Directorate participated, it was reported that the short-term objective is to have a detailed mapping of the flow of operations, company by company.
And this would be linked to the order that is being processed from that last portfolio to cameras and companies to complete a detailed Excel file in which they must record import projections until 2022, as well as a complete description of the products they plan to enter. Also, information such as projections of production and sales in the domestic market is being requested for the coming years.
As explained by a source who participated in the meeting, they want to have a complete x-ray and contrast it with the macroeconomy. That is, detect if there are imports that are not aligned with the reality of the sector in which each firm operates.
This, in part, because they would have observed suspicious movements by various firms. Specifically, during the meeting, officials told them that they had detected cases of "companies that were bringing 50 or 60 containers, but that they are on behalf of retirees before the AFIP," according to one of the attendees.
The director of a chamber that held meetings with some of these officials pointed out to this outlet that the idea would also be to review the list of companies benefiting from the customs system of Reliable Operators, which allows managing administrative and logistical issues related to import and export faster.
"They found movements that companies would have made in recent years that did not convince them," said the source.
"The final objective is to clean the registry of importers and separate the good ones from those that are not," he said, and then add that "creating a firm and starting to bring things from abroad is not difficult. On the contrary, it is very simple, it is enough to take out a CUIT and obtain a tax code with level 3. ”
Goodbye to the robot that "hired" Macri
In dialogue with iProfessionalOfficial sources confirmed that the Government is moving forward with much deeper control to see what enters the country, at what prices and where it comes from.
“Macri established the Integrated Import Monitoring System (SIMI), with which it monitored the 12% of operations. As he did? With a computer robot. And it worked like this: one company presented the Non-Automatic License and after three days, the robot authorized it. As simple as that. What was done with the new management? That robot was terminated, ”they explained off.
“Now there is a revision of the documentation that is presented to avoid maneuvers such as under-invoicing and so that what is being declared as import is effectively what later enters the country. We are looking at everything ”, he expanded.
Regarding risk profiles, he indicated that "the fact that it is no longer a robot that authorizes operations allows you to see who the operators are trying to enter merchandise."
In addition, the source provided a striking data: "What we could see in recent years is that the CUITs of importers had multiplied and this, beyond being linked to possible irregularities, also has consequences on the market, because a company With little experience, that imports merchandise without planning, surely later it will end up selling those products below the market price and cannibalizing the industries. ”
Industrial, on alert
A well-known business leader, who has fluid contact with the new authorities, assured that “there are practices that have been going on for quite some time. In times of exchange rate stability, imports are sub-invoiced, at the price or volume level, to avoid taxes. Another maneuver is trademark fraud. In general, they are shell companies that make a lot of profit. ”
He even pointed out the case of firms that, under the umbrella of different figureheads, "import for a value and sell it to themselves in the domestic market at a much higher value, so that they have VAT left for purchase as a tax credit" .
A director of an entity related to the consumer electronics sector assured that under-invoicing is a classic of the item: “They bring goods at half price to avoid taxes and then sell one part in black and another in white, under-invoiced. In general, they operate over the Internet or supply businesses located from the second cordon of Greater Buenos Aires ”.
"They are companies that do what we call 'I touch and go.' They are created and, without history, they start to matter. Then they disappear and restart the entire cycle with another name and CUIT ”, he listed.
In the toy sector they also suffer situations of this type: "We find companies that change their name, year after year, that import under different CUITs, under different facades, but are the same operators."
In this branch of activity, they crossed data and detected that, in recent years, 30% of foreign purchase operations "are suspected of under-invoicing."
"That 30% declared a value of less than u$s3 per kilo, a level quite close to the price of plastic, of the raw material," said the source, adding that even when Customs sets criteria values, which establish a minimum floor below the which a good cannot enter, “there are companies that elude it by appealing to a jump in tariff position. That is to say, declaring that they bring a certain article, which is not reached by those limitations, when in reality they are importing something else ”.
In this context of stocks, in addition, import overbilling operations are once again in the crosshairs, a phenomenon that usually becomes more relevant when the exchange rate is unfolded in the economy and there are restrictions on accessing currencies.
In fact, during the stocks that were implemented in the days of Cristina Kirchner, the AFIP suspended more than 30 companies that operated in Commerce outside for alleged maneuvers of this type.
What companies usually do is inflate the import value, obtain these currencies through a private bank (which requests them from the BCRA) and then collude them with the foreign supplier, so that they can then be redirected to countries with opacity fiscal.
There have also been cases of companies overvaluing the cost of ocean freight to leak foreign exchange.
In this context, the importers who participated in the meeting with the Industry Secretariat assured that the measures with which the Government seeks to make the registry of operators transparent are positive.
"If those who are not healthy are separated from those who are healthy and control is carried out, we totally agree," they stated from the entity that groups them.
By Juan Diego Wasilevsky
For iProfesional.com