On April 24th, Exempt Resolution No. 1223-TG was published in the Official Gazette, implementing Article 14 Transitory of the Tax Compliance Law, which defines the criteria and implementation of the “Automatic Prescription of Tax Debts” by the Treasury Service.
As a result of this resolution, the General Treasury of the Republic (“TGR”, for its initials in Spanish) declared that the government’s collection actions regarding taxes, fines, tax credits, and surcharges issued or assessed up to December 31st, 2013, are prescribed. For all legal purposes, the definitive date of prescription was set as April 15th, 2025. According to official data from the TGR, this measure affected over one and a half million debts, benefiting approximately 214,000 individuals and 93,000 companies.
This means that regional or provincial treasuries may not initiate or continue any actions to collect these prescribed taxes, such as garnishments, withholdings, or the offsetting of tax refunds. These debts will be removed from the taxpayer’s unique tax account, a change already reflected in the Debt Certificate downloadable from the Treasury Service’s online platform.
However, not all debts issued or assessed by December 2013 were included in this measure. Eligible debts had to meet certain conditions: they had to be different from property taxes, be subject to administrative or judicial collection, and their essential elements could not be under dispute. Additionally, the following debts were not declared prescribed:
a. Those with pending legal actions before the Tax and Customs Courts (“TTA”, for its initials in Spanish), Courts of Appeals, or the Supreme Court;
b. Those related to convictions for tax crimes;
c. Those subject to Bankruptcy Law provisions without a final administrative account.
One of the objectives of this measure is to allow the TGR to optimize its portfolio of uncollectible debts -that is, old tax debts for which all collection avenues have been exhausted-, so that it can focus on more recent debts that are more likely to be recovered.
Furthermore, with the enactment of the new law, additional requirements were introduced in Article 196 of the Tax Code for a debt to be declared uncollectible. These include thresholds for debt amounts, taxpayer income, efforts to locate and exhaust banking resources, absence of sizeable assets, among others.
These stricter criteria show that, while the measure provides legal certainty to taxpayers, it also allows the government to focus enforcement efforts on debts that can be collected, filtering out those that effectively meet the criteria for being deemed uncollectible.
It is also important to highlight that in cases where there are other ongoing collection proceedings before a Court Officer or Civil Court, it is the taxpayers themselves who must request the order to lift liens or encumbrances. This is due to the operational difficulties it would pose for the Treasury, considering the volume of cases and the involvement of other entities beyond the authority of the Tax Collector—such as, for example, in the case of property seizures handled by the Real Estate Registrar.
It should also be noted that even if liens are lifted in cases involving debts prior to 2013, if there are ongoing collection processes for later obligations, the TGR may lift the lien in the case involving prescribed debts but impose a new one for the currently enforceable debts.
In summary, this is a positive measure that brings certainty to long-standing obligations between taxpayers and the state. Its implementation helps to regularize tax and financial situations and allows the Treasury to focus its collection efforts. It remains to be seen how this will be applied in active cases, and it is hoped that the TGR will provide appropriate tools through its online platform to facilitate the lifting of precautionary measures resulting from this Resolution.