Argentina’s tax agency supports global cryptocurrency information exchange

The Federal Agency of Public Revenues (AFIP), the tax agency from Argentina, has shared its opinion on cryptocurrencies and assured that it supports their inclusion in information exchange systems.
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The Federal Agency of Public Revenues (AFIP), the tax agency from Argentina, has shared its opinion on cryptocurrencies and assured that it supports their inclusion in information exchange systems.

The head of AFIP Mercedes Marcó del Pont said that “it’s necessary to include crypto assets, digital currencies and electronic money in international systems that exchange information,” since this would help prevent them from becoming tax evasion tools.

Marcó del Pont, who is also the former President of the Central Bank of Argentina, shared her views during the 56th General Assembly of the Inter-American Center of Tax Administrations (CIAT), which responded to a need to regulate activities that already exist but are not included in any registry.

The director would support the inclusion of operations of digital currencies and crypto assets in the automatic information exchange systems of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as is carried out with bank accounts. This, as she says, has allowed the tax agency to raise $6.9m in just two years.

“The recent Argentinian experience shows that the automatic exchange of information on financial accounts is a key tool to fight evasion by the sectors with the greatest taxpaying capacity,” said the head of the AFIP.

“Not only we started using the information received and strengthened human and technological resources, but we also created new instruments to address other problems such as possible abuses in the internal operations of large multinational companies and we launched tools that allow us to know the true owners of the companies,” she added.

Back in February, AFIP made the decision to start taking digital wallets into account in its list of eligible assets that can be seized to recover the money that taxpayers owe to the State. This measure represented the first step of the tax agency in entering digital currencies, since previously only bank accounts, assets and credits, among other things, were taken into account.

“We deepened the recovery of the capacities of the State to control evasion with the focus on increasing the contribution by focusing on taxpayers with the largest capacity,” said Marcó del Pont.

And she concluded: “Tax collection is the genuine source of financing to implement public policies that allow progress with the necessary transformations to achieve more inclusion and equity.”