Government the whole import system will change to prevent further registration “revived” by some companies trying to do 100% exchange gap business between the official “cheap” dollar to which the products lead and alternative dollars. They aim to deactivate under-billing, triangulating or overstocking operations.

The Secretary of Commerce, AFIP and Customs has chosen the symbolic 17 October to cancel the current SIMI system (born in 2018). will be replaced by the SIRA (Import system of the Argentine Republic). The resolution will be published in the Official Gazette between next Tuesday and Wednesday.

All SIMIs presented but not approved will lose their validity e The process must be resubmitted. Also precautionary measures will be ineffective (abstract) presented by the companies asking the Justice to allow them to import. There were 4,000 injunctions for $ 1,000 million.

From the government estimate that these companies they will no longer make appearances in court.

The new system will allow you to check the entire path of an import in real time. Customs, AFIP, Central Bank and Secretariat of Commerce will have a sort of “control Panel” to be followed case by case. To facilitate the monitoring and “traceability” of operations, from now on there will be a Single Foreign Trade Current Account.

Once a company submits the new import request, its Economic financial capacity (CEF) and the Customs and tax risk profile. This last review will take into account if in the past the company has been involved in a case of overbilling of imports, abusive use of injunctions or failure to submit Declarations.

In exchange, the Government will give companies the fexact date on which you can turn the dollars overseas to pay for imports.

Also, access to the foreign exchange market for SMEs will be reduced from 180 to 60 days and civil entities and, for those wishing to pay for imports with their own dollars (which will increase if money laundering is approved foreseen in the Budget 2023 project) there will be a simplified procedure,

At customs they already have it characterized the maneuvers they were discovering. And they are putting some numbers into it. For example, the cataracts of the SIMIs presented are said to have reached a value of 94,076 million dollars up to September, 65% more than what was actually imported (57,531 million dollars). The companies asked and asked for SIMI and, if they left, they were overloaded, they explain in the dependence commanded by Guillermo Michel. They also presented the same SIMI twice or for amounts that far exceeded a product’s import history.

The Government also noted that there were companies that presented SIMI for items outside their category. They denounced 28,000 triangulation operations carried out by 715 companies worth US $ 650 million.

Another of the maneuvers of the companies consisted in the importation of products linked to the Covid pandemic whose tariffs had been lowered to zero. There have been cases where, for example, disposable gloves were brought in that weren’t even taken off customs, just to get access to the official dollar.

In addition to the SIMIs, 204 cases were found in which the companies presented themselves inaccurate statements to improve its economic and financial capacity (CEF) and thus increase the level of its imports.

Finally, the use of the free zone of La Plata, whose occupants do not require SIMI for import, was discovered as an exit channel for the dollar: in the first quarter of the year it went from 185 million dollars of import to 600 million dollars.

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