Middle class bond: public agencies will open summaries to determine responsibilities

The information revealed by the Internal Revenue Service (SII) on Friday caused annoyance in the government and in particular in the Ministry of Finance: 437,703 dependent workers presented differences between the amount that they self-declared as July 2020 taxable salary at the time of request. this benefit and the real one calculated from their mandatory pension contributions or from what is actually received, but more annoying is the fact that 37,100 of them were public officials.

For this reason, on the same Friday, October 2, the Treasury handed over the information to the Comptroller General of the Republic to initiate an investigation.

Sources familiar with the process state that given the volume of officials, the most efficient formula to investigate the facts is for the different departments to carry out internal administrative procedures to determine what happened in each case and then send the results of the summaries to the Comptroller’s Office for to analyze said investigation and the respective sanctions.

Government officials point out that to initiate the investigation, the heads of service of each department contacted the SII to know the details of each case and thus begin the process.

Public officials who have received a bonus without deserving it fail the principle of probity and risk a penalty that ranges from a sanction to dismissal. Everything will depend on the case by case that is resolved in the investigation.

It should also be remembered that since August 26, the Comptroller’s Office began an audit at the SII and the Treasury due to possible problems in the application and payment of the bond. According to the information reported, the availability of the systems used, non-compliance with the payment date and deposit in accounts not reported by beneficiaries is investigated.

To restore the resources, the SII said that it established a procedure, without readjustments, fines or interest, through a platform available on the website of the General Treasury of the Republic, until November 30. According to the SII, “we are in a first stage in which we seek to generate facilities so that the workers who must make the refund of the bonus do so without any type of readjustment, fines or interest.” The Service specifies that in addition to contacting them, “there is the possibility that they may provide well-founded records that show that they did comply with the legal requirements. What we seek here is to safeguard the correct use of public resources. Once this process is finished, different actions contemplated in our management model will be promoted, which are proportional to non-compliance ”.

When asked about whether there is a differentiated treatment between private and public sector workers, they stated that “as a Service, and in accordance with the principle of tax equity, we do not make differences between public officials and private sector workers. For us, they are all taxpayers who must correctly comply with their obligations to the country and its inhabitants ”.

The issue was not only on the administrative edge, but also on the political side. If on Tuesday, the president of the Labor Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, Gael Yeomans (Social Convergence), asked the government for a “pardon”, this Tuesday the heads of the parties of Chile Vamos asked the national prosecutor, Jorge Abbott, initiate an investigation ex officio, which allows to conclude with the clarification of possible crimes of subsidy fraud or perjury. The prosecution had indicated on Friday that it was evaluating opening an investigation.

Likewise, the legislators asked the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Diego Paulsen, to hold a special session for Tuesday, October 20, in order to address the cases of public officials who have improperly received the middle class bonus.