Increase on taxes for the City of Buenos Aires

Before the arrival of 2013, many citizens of Buenos Aires received a not-so-pleasant present: the “ABL”¹ bill. In an attempt to calm the negative reaction that the increase on the Lighting and Cleaning tax created, the chief of government, Mauricio Macri explained the reason of said increase and apologized for it.

According to Macri, the rise on the ABL in the City of Buenos Aires is due to the inflation that the country is having. According to the Chief of the Government of the City, there is a current 25% of inflation that affects everything: salaries, services, fuel, etc. The increase would round a 23%; nevertheless, many people received an increase that exceeded the 23% and got up to 100% or more. According to what Macri explained, “The idea is to take the tax rate up to 1% of the commercial value of each house; so if a property is worth 1,000,000 pesos, the owner will have to pay 10,000 pesos of tax.

Since many of the new increases still don’t cover that 1% of the total value on some houses, during the next years the prices on ABL will continue to rise until they reach that percentage.

The increase on the ABL in the City of Buenos Aires wasn’t well received by the citizens specially after having suffered some troubles weeks ago, where the garbage on the streets hadn't been gathered; there were also some electricity shut downs and flooding in many areas of the city.

Many citizens of Buenos Aires have made their claims to the “Asociación de Defensa de Usuarios y Consumidores de la Argentina (Adecua)" [in charge of defending consumer’s rights]. This association is investigating the cases, although it states that the increase on the ABL is supported by the Law no. 4040”, which was approved in 2011, and which allows the executive power of the City of Buenos Aires to update the tax rate once a year.

The reason why the increase was so big in some cases is because this tax has never been automatically updated, so, for many years many people have paid too little, and now the updating came and the change is too big. The overall problem and discontent of the citizens of Buenos Aires is due to the fact that the tax seems too high for the services that are being provided.