MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina signs deal with US regarding undeclared taxpayers' assets

All accounts will be reported, regardless of their size

Argentina's Superminister of Economy, Industry, and Agriculture Sergio Massa Monday signed an agreement with US Ambassador Marc Stanley for the automatic exchange between the two countries of information about undeclared assets owned by local taxpayers.

The deal is expected to allow Argentina's tax bureau AFIP to access information on funds estimated to be around US$ 100 billion leaked to the United States by Argentine fiscal residents to avoid taxation.

Once the agreement enters into force on Jan. 1, Argentina will have access “on a massive scale” to the data of “all the accounts opened by Argentine residents, either in their individual name or as heads of a company, the balances, movements and even the income obtained from interests, profits or dividends that they may have obtained and credited in that country,” it was explained.

The Argentine government is also sending a bill to Congress in the next few days to help fight money laundering, so that those who have assets abroad may regularize them before the new mechanism detects them.

Massa said that a similar agreement signed in 2017 by the previous government “was of no use to us because it was a person-by-person exchange, upon request,” whereby data on only 68 people were accessed. Information was confidential and AFIP even needed to buy security software for that agreement to be signed.

In any case, the Argentine government still has to work on the new deal's fine print, the so-called “implementation stage,” according to Buenos Aires media.

Massa said some undeclared US$ 100 billion are in the United States, particularly in Florida and New York, and that all accounts will be reported, regardless of the size of their deposits. The Argentine Government also claimed that this deal did not need to go through Congress to become operational.