This project is above all a beginning for tax innocence and for us to stop depending on general resolutions and start depending on the law." From the opposition, the radical Maximiliano Abad celebrated this initiative since "this new approach recognizes that taxpayers are innocent until the tax authorities, with documentation and evidence, prove otherwise. Buenos Aires, December 19 (NA) - La Libertad Avanza today in the Senate, along with its allies, secured a majority report on the "Tax Innocence" bill, which will allow this initiative to be debated along with the Budget in the session to be held on December 26. The decision was made in a meeting of the Justice and Criminal Affairs Committee - chaired by libertarian Juan Carlos Pagotto - after analyzing the text voted by the Chamber of Deputies in the early hours of Thursday. The initiative will be discussed on December 26 along with the 2026 Budget, as learned by the Argentine News Agency. When opening the debate, the libertarian senator stated that "in Argentina we are changing paradigms, before the AFIP was used as the regime's police. It is a very important conceptual change." However, the senator expressed "his concern about the update of fines, particularly in the case of sworn statements, which go from 200 to 220,000 pesos, without the law specifying the system used for that increase or establishing differences between micro, small, medium and large taxpayers." Radical Maximiliano Abad supported the Tax Innocence project. DETAILS: The bill proposed by the national Executive branch amends the Tax Penal Regime (Law 24.769); to Fiscal Procedures (Law 11.683) and the Civil and Commercial Code of the Nation; as well as, a Simplified Affidavit Regime. The initiative creates a "Simplified Regime of Profits" whereby, according to the Government, taxpayers who adhere will be "forever shielded". This regime, which will have a patrimonial cap of up to 10 billion pesos to be able to join, guarantees taxpayers not having to report on patrimonial variations, nor will their consumptions be controlled. This means that ARCA will only charge them the Income Tax on the income they have invoiced, regardless of the eventual patrimonial growth (which will not be controlled) and from that base, consumptions will be deducted. Article 39 of the project "establishes the liberating effect of payment, if the content of the affidavit proposed by ARCA is accepted and the payment is made on time; except that income has been omitted." The Tax Innocence project increases the amounts for a person to be considered to have committed the crime of simple evasion, going from $1,500,000 to $100,000,000. Meanwhile, for the conduct to be investigated to be considered "aggravated evasion", the threshold must exceed 1 billion pesos (no longer 15 million). On the other hand, the statute of limitations for tax obligations is reduced from five to three years. ARCA will not initiate criminal proceedings as long as the debts and their respective interests are paid, although this benefit will only run once per taxpayer. If the complaint has not yet been filed, it will be extinguished if the taxpayer pays those obligations by paying an additional 50% within 30 business days from the notification of the imputation. Despite the project aiming to relax fiscal controls, the amounts of economic sanctions for filing sworn statements late will increase.
