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The matter was put by the Minister of Finance, Ignacio Briones, when he went to expose a few weeks ago to the Chamber’s Labor Commission. “If you ask what is the detailed payroll that the State of Chile pays month after month, you will not find that payroll either, which seems quite incredible in the XXI century”, Briones said.
His comment pointed to the null information that the State has in a centralized way about how many public officials are and how much they earn. With that on the table, the questions that immediately arose were: How then do you know the number of public officials who would have received the bonus irregularly? How did the Treasury or the Internal Revenue Service (SII) know their income to conclude that they did not meet the requirements to receive this tax contribution?
The subject has been talking for weeks in the Comptroller’s teams that are auditing the SII for the mechanism used to request this bonus and also in the prosecution that is investigating, for now, a possible crime of subsidy fraud. But the first to make this issue transparent was the comptroller Jorge Bermudez.
He did it last week when he made a presentation to the same commission in which Briones had previously done it. “The SII basically made two crosses. With the Superintendency of Pensions on the one hand and then with the transactions that were made through BancoEstado. Here I would dare to say, yes, that generates a doubt for me, this is a doubt that must be clarified, and it is how this information is accessed. This is obviously a matter for auditing, since in principle what exists is bank secrecy. Although the SII has the power to lift bank secrecy, it can do so in two cases, which are administratively notifying the account holder or by judicial authorization. Then it would be necessary to determine if that actually operated”, Affirmed Bermúdez.
Thanks to the information provided by BancoEstado, the SII was able to identify that of the 437,703 dependent workers who accessed the Middle Class Bonus without meeting the requirements, 37,100 are public officials. Regarding all of them, several institutions initiated summaries, which should be frozen by a ruling issued by Bermúdez last week.
The issue is already being part of the issues that the supervisory body is reviewing in the SII. The same is being done by the team led by the Los Lagos regional prosecutor, Carmen Gloria Wittwer. The main point to be clarified is what was the way in which the SII accessed the banking information of public officials, under what legal standard it did so and if any information that would be protected by bank secrecy had been violated. What is clear is that, at least for now, the SII has not requested these data either through the courts or through the administrative channels.
The Third PM He consulted the SII on this matter and the agency explained that the data was requested via official letter, but they ruled out any possible violation of banking secrecy. “The Internal Revenue Service only had access to the payrolls processed by Banco Estado for workers dependent on the public sector, whose salaries are also public according to Law No. 20,285 on Access to Public Information. That is to say, only accessed the amount of the salary to determine if in those cases there was a fall of at least 30% in the taxable salary of July, in accordance with the obligation given by the law to verify compliance with the requirements to access the Tax Contribution for the Middle Class. In no case did the SII have access to financial movements or information protected by bank secrecy”, They pointed out from the SII.
The service also added that “within its attributions, the Service may request information from different entities to perform analysis and data cross-checking to comply with the mandates indicated by law.” Along the same lines, they added that “for the purposes of verification of requirements established in Law No. 21,252 As a service we have not exercised the powers we have for the purpose of obtaining information protected under bank secrecy or reserve. If this were necessary, it would be carried out in accordance with the rules contained in arts. 61 and following of the Tax Code, which establish the corresponding procedure ”.
