In recent months, municipalities in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area have approved significant increases in local taxes and created specific levies on commercial activities to sustain their finances amid a real decline in revenue and national spending cuts. In Berazategui, the new tax ordinance allowed for increases of up to 80% in ABL (property) and commercial permit fees, with the possibility of further adjustments starting in March. The central point, according to tax consultants and business leaders, will be the traceability of the money: how much additional revenue the 2% surcharge on purchases will generate and on what specific projects it will be reflected for the residents of Pilar. For a bill of 10,000 pesos, the surcharge is around 165 pesos; for a purchase of 50,000 pesos, it climbs above 800 pesos. Until now, the scheme was very different: the environmental fee was charged as a fixed value per ticket, calculated in “municipal modules”. Business chambers and tax firms have been warning that these figures “resemble taxes more than fees,” because they do not have a direct or proportional relationship between the amount charged and a service effectively rendered to the taxpayer. Tax consultant César Litvin, who has been following the issue of municipal taxes in the province of Buenos Aires, pointed out that Pilar's new design introduces a mandatory surcharge on every transaction that chains cannot absorb and which ends up being passed on “entirely” to the price. The provincial supreme court dismissed the claim on technical grounds and upheld the taxes, which was read by the municipality as a political and legal endorsement to maintain them. With the new 2% surcharge on supermarket purchases, the discussion is reopening in a different context: now the impact is directly on the receipts of thousands of consumers doing their Christmas shopping at the large chains in the district. A broader map of increases and “eco-fees” in municipalities. What is happening in Pilar is not an isolated case. The rate for large supermarket chains was set at 2% on the amount of the transaction, net of VAT, according to the Fiscal and Imposing Ordinance 2026 approved by the Deliberative Council. According to what Argentine News Agency learned, in practice, the surcharge functions as an additional charge at the register: it is settled on the ticket along with the purchase, and the companies act as mandatory collection agents required to remit the fee to the municipality. Since the 2% surcharge is applied equally to any resident who shops at a supermarket in Pilar, regardless of their income level, the relative burden is greater for lower-income households. That is, the impact was almost imperceptible on a large purchase, but heavy on small consumptions. Buenos Aires, December 5 (NA) - The municipality of Pilar, governed by Federico Achával, has implemented a new scheme for the so-called Environmental Protection Fee as of December 1st, which is now charged as a percentage on each purchase made by residents in supermarkets, hypermarkets, shopping malls, hotels, and industries in the district. With the reform approved for 2026, the fee becomes fully proportional to the size of the ticket and multiplies the potential revenue in a key month marked by Christmas and year-end shopping. An “environmental fee” that goes into the general fund. The legal framework of the tax is detailed in Chapter XXV of the Fiscal Ordinance 2026. According to its analysis, this increases the cost of the basic basket of Pilar's residents compared to other districts that do not apply an equivalent charge and deepens the “unfair competition” with smaller businesses or chains not covered by the collection system. For Litvin and other specialists consulted in recent works on “eco-fees,” the problem is not only the inflationary impact but the legal principle: if the resources go into a general fund and are not measurably linked to the environmental service, the figure moves away from the concept of a fee and approaches a local sales tax, something that Argentine case law has repeatedly questioned. Caputo vs. Achával: the political fight. The increase in the environmental fee in Pilar did not go unnoticed by the national government. For many specialists, when the tax base is the value of the purchase and the revenue goes into freely available funds, the tax moves away from that logic and approaches a sales tax disguised as a fee. This is added to the issue of progressivity. Pilar is one of the districts where there was already controversy over other local taxes, such as the road tax on fuels and the Environmental Protection Fee itself in its previous version. The tax base is set as the amount of the transaction net of VAT, and the scheme is implemented through a collection and withholding system at the point of sale. But the most sensitive point for specialists is at the end of the chapter: article 331 establishes that all revenue from this fee integrates “the municipality's freely available funds.” That is, no specific account is created, nor is there an obligation to allocate these resources to concrete environmental programs, as happens, for example, with other local contributions oriented to climate contingencies. This wording fuels the suspicion that, rather than a fee linked to a specific consideration, it is in fact a hidden consumption tax that the municipality decides to collect by leveraging the collection capacity of large chains. Criticism from tax consultants: “hidden taxes” and impact on prices. Pilar's decision is part of a broader trend of municipalities that, in recent years, have begun to apply local taxes on mass consumption, often under environmental or social labels. But the ordinance itself admits that the resources are integrated into the general fund without specific allocation. In 2024, the Buenos Aires Supreme Court rejected a claim of unconstitutionality against the road tax and other local contributions, including the environmental one and a mandatory contribution to the Emergency Hospital, in a case promoted by opposition leaders. And the competitive advantage can shift to businesses in other districts or sales channels not covered by the collection system, which strains the local commercial fabric. For now, the municipality defends the scheme on environmental grounds and presents it as a tool to finance plazas, green spaces, recycling points, and works related to environmental care. Since the tax base is the purchase amount without value-added tax, 2% is equivalent to about 1.65% of the final price seen by the consumer. There it describes that the taxable event is a series of environmental services under the municipality's charge: maintenance and expansion of plazas and green spaces, installation of “green points” for recycling, purchase of differentiated containers, programs to reduce waste, promotion of renewable energies, construction of bike paths and aerobic trails, and actions for the control and monitoring of potential environmental damage, among other points. The taxpayers are defined as “large waste generators”: supermarkets and hypermarkets, stores in shopping malls and commercial galleries, 2 to 5-star hotels, industries, service companies, and private universities. In Quilmes and Lanús, updates average between 40% and 45%, although local business leaders warn that the effective burden may be greater due to the accumulation of additional charges and coefficients. Other districts have implemented specific taxes on consumption. In 2024, for example, supermarkets paid the equivalent of two modules per purchase, an amount that at that time was around 38 pesos per operation; with the 2025 updates, the charge reached close to 70 pesos. Hurlingham created a municipal fund for soup kitchens and canteens that involves a 1% contribution on billing for hypermarkets and wholesalers; Almirante Brown advanced with a tax on non-returnable containers (bottles, cans, disposable diapers, PET bottles), with fixed amounts per unit sold; Neuquén implemented a 10% charge on a bulky waste fee; and Lanús ordered a 30% increase in the Safety and Hygiene fee for banks, financial entities, and high-billing supermarkets. In this context, Pilar's decision to transform a fixed charge into a percentage of the amount of each purchase appears as another link in an extended strategy: to shift part of the fiscal tension to municipal taxes, even at the cost of increasing basic consumptions. The coming discussion: legality, progressivity, and transparency. The case of the Environmental Protection Fee again raises a fundamental question: what limits do municipalities have to tax consumption and to what extent do these fees respect the constitutional criterion of corresponding to a specific, divisible, and measurable service. In his message, he stated that while the central administration says it is working to lower taxes and improve competitiveness, some opposition mayors “raise them as if nothing,” and capped it off with a phrase directed to the local leaders: “they don't care about the people.” The remark is not casual. The Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, spoke out on social networks against the measure and used it as an example of the tension between national and municipal fiscal policy.
