Prelude: Corrupt is as Corrupt Does

Puerto Rico Tax Collections Take The Easy Road

https://youtu.be/uwlAvsPvPfg

Very quietly this week, Governor Garcia Padilla signed into law, the 2015 Puerto Rico Incentives for the Payment of Taxes in Advance of the Tax Transformation Project Act. The new law offers an amnesty for payment of taxes.  The hope of the Garcia Padilla administration is the new incentive will encourage the payment of overdue taxes.  Beginning immediately, the amnesty will be open until June 30, 2015.

With the new law, the Puerto Rico government is looking to raise around $290 million during its operation.  The taxes collected are predicted to help reduce the government's fiscal deficit for this year.

Analysis

What surprised me most about the news is who the new law is targeting.  Besides snuggling up to those evil evasores, with the new law:

"taxpayers can prepay, at incentivized rates, tax that will be payable in the future on the capital gains arising from the increased value of certain assets, including equity investments, and contributions to individual retirement and savings accounts."

Wait a minute, hold the phones. This is a pretty dense way of saying that, if you're rich enough to actually have capital gains, you can reduce your income taxes with this new amnesty law.  How convenient for those who have the "burden" of capital gains.

Conclusion

I'm saddened that our government doesn't have the will to pursue the taxes our laws demand be paid.  But, I've seen this before, it's fairly common.  In fact, our legislators are offering a two-fer, consequently with the Hacienda amnesty, CESCO is also currently offering an amnesty on toll violations. 

In a previous life I worked in IT for a major wireless carrier, so I know what collections is all about.  Cutting edge technology was always a factor in collection rate optimization.  Because going in, it was already accepted that collections would never reach 100%, ni por tanto.  If memory serves me, I think we had an average  30% success rate on past due collections.  Your company's rate may vary. ;-)

I offer this anecdote to provide a perspective for these questions:

• What is the minimum accepted collection rate for this program?
• What is the overall amount of past taxes due?  And how many people or companies are we talking about?
• Just how many toll violations are there and how much is owed in the corresponding fines?
• Don't we have their contact information?  What, we don't know how to "find" them?  
• What is the Government's resolve concerning enforcing the rule of law? 

Puerto Rico's Prepaid Tax Program

Rarely do you see the clear intention of laws made to benefit the few, maybe only the "1 percent" of the Puerto Rico general population.  Of course, since corporations are now people, they're included in the 1% as well. For brevity's sake, I'll break down this new program and prove that it straight up "informal corruption."