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“I agree that the sooner a tax reform is processed, the better,” says Mauricio Santamaría, president of the center for economic studies Anif, after the Minister of Finance, Alberto Carrasquilla, said on Monday that a project will be presented to Congress in that sense the first quarter of next year.
According to the minister, it is necessary to process this project after the pandemic has caused state revenues to fall while expenses increased to attend the health emergency and respond to aid to those most affected by the economic blow of confinements and restrictions. .
(Read: Tax reform will be presented in the first quarter of 2021)
Santamaría, former Minister of Protection and former Director of Planning, stated what in his opinion the tax reform should include, but before making his suggestions, he expressed his expectation that “this time it can be discussed well and the discussions are not caricatured as usual. “
“Congress,” he added, “has a great responsibility to discuss this reform seriously, slowly and based on evidence and fiscal needs, which are many. Rarely has a reform been as important as this one.”
(Also: Lower inflation in 65 years, ingredient to negotiate minimum wage)
For the president of Anif, the reform should include four fundamental things:
more people contributing to income tax; eliminate exemptions; reduce parafiscals and strengthen green taxes.
On the first point, he says that there must be a significant increase in the number of income contributors, “so that we pay many more Colombians, each one according to their ability to pay.”
(Also: Lower inflation in 65 years, ingredient to negotiate minimum wage)
He warns that he considers it implausible that in Colombia natural persons only pay 1.2 percent of GDP in income tax and that there are only about 2 million taxpayers, that is, 4.5 percent of those who are in the labor market .
Regarding the second point, he says that most of the exemptions and exceptions should be removed, both in income and VAT, which are worth about 8 points of GDP. This includes – he says – exemptions for high income and income sectors and the exclusion of the VAT family basket, whose regressive impact can be counteracted by increasing the refund already underway.
(Read: ‘In the Commission we are not going to discuss only a percentage’: Mintrabajo)
Third, it invites you to follow the path of reducing parafiscal taxes that began in 2012.
The fourth point suggested by Santamaría is to move forward with green taxes, without affecting the generation of electricity or its prices for the public.
ECONOMY AND BUSINESS
