MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentine importers warn about ‘complications’ with new imports scheme

Diego Pérez Santisteban: no clear criteria: all imports less than half a million dollars are almost automatic

The head of the Importers Chamber of Argentina, Diego Pérez Santisteban, warned that the new imports controls applied by the government “is complicated,” and affects the bigger companies more than the small and medium ones of the sector.

“The presentation of the information is complicated. We see that the small importers, the ones that had imported less that $500,000 dollars last year, fluently receive their permissions. And those cases that exceed this amount, bigger importers, go through a slower procedure”, Pérez Santisteban continued.

He stated that “what the importer has to do is to present an advanced sworn statement form on imports, which is a procedure that he or a customs officer can do”

“Afterwards, this same information has to be sent via email to the Domestic Trade secretariat, and this board will later decide along with the AFIP tax revenue office if it is approved or not.”

During an interview, Pérez Santisteban considered that “it’s still premature to know which is the criterion used to decide the approval or observation” the government uses.

“Almost 20% of the presentations made (since the beginning of February) have observations. That’s why, from now onwards we’ll have to see which is the criteria used to determine the observations made,” he assured.

For those who imported in 2011 for less than half a million dollars, the approval of import will be almost automatic, but it gets complicated for those who import for more than that amount of money.

Apparently AFIP approved 4.600 sworn statements but has frozen another 2.900. The rest are under scrutiny by Secretary Moreno and his reduced staff. Since February first a total of 16.000 imports’ sworn statements have been presented.

Under the new rules AFIP has 72 hours to approve or make observations to the sworn statements, and “so far the time period has been respected”.

In 2011 the number of import operations in Argentina reached 835.000 but it is estimated the number sill be considerably less because of the latest measures implemented.