The Central Bank of the Argentine Republic (BCRA) must dictate the regulatory rules of the exchange regime and exercise the oversight that its compliance requires in accordance with the provisions of its Organic Charter, article 29, paragraph b.
Exchange controls have been reestablished by Decree No. 609/2019 of 01/09/2019, following the PASO primary elections of 11/08/2019.
Therefore, as of 01/09/2019, the BCRA issued COM A 6770, which reestablishes exchange controls after almost 4 years of exchange deregulation.
Since that date until now, the BCRA has issued 161 Communications A of the CAMEX regulations, that is, rules that regulate the foreign exchange market.
On October 17, 2022, the BCRA and the AFIP jointly issued Communication A 7622 and General Resolution 5171/2022 respectively. Through these regulations, the AFIP creates the Single Foreign Trade Current Account where financial institutions must record and validate foreign trade operations for the payment of goods and services.
On the other hand, on that historic date of October 17, a new regime for imports of goods was created: the SIRA to replace the SIMI and the SIRASE to replace the SIMPES to pay for services abroad.
This shared interaction between the BCRA and the AFIP to regulate, control and supervise exchange operations is not new, since during the period 2011 to 2015 there was this simultaneous control of exchange operations imitating the regulations in force in a Caribbean Latin American country.
Delays
Thus, with the SIRA, SIMPES and Single Foreign Trade Current Account now established, different situations are beginning to arise that cause delays in access to the official dollar exchange market for importers of goods and services.
These situations have caused multiple delays in foreign trade payments without the need for the BCRA or the AFIP to issue regulations and, consequently, without assuming the political cost of issuing regulations that further restrict access to the exchange market.
First, importers of goods encountered delays in the approval of SIRAs for periods much longer than those for the approval of SIMIs.
In cases where SIRAs are approved after several months, the period of access to the exchange market is 60, 90, 180 and up to 365 days from the date of entry of the goods into the country.
On the other hand, in the SIRA approvals, the definitive term of access to the exchange market indicated by the Ministry of Commerce, instead of being numerical, often does not indicate a term or a dash is indicated, which causes financial institutions to be unable to determine the payment term established by COM A 7622 from the date of entry of the goods into the country.
Regarding payments for services abroad that need to have a SIRASE in “approved” status, there have been multiple delays in approvals by the AFIP, in many cases for several months.
Until April 2023, SIRASE were valid for 30 days within the calendar month from the date of issue, therefore if the approval was in the last days of the month, the client did not have time to go to the bank to bring the documents to send abroad the approved SIRASE and the 48-hour prior scheduling established by the BCRA's advance operations information regime called RIAO.
The expired SIRASE for the month had to be requested again and start waiting for approval again.
The SIRASE were then extended to a validity period of 90 days from the approval date, but said approval date does not appear in the SIRASE and, therefore, financial institutions since April 20 cannot provide certain services for not having said approval date, such as: research and development services, professional services, legal services, advertising services and architectural services.
In other words, the lack of a simple approval date has caused a delay in payments abroad of almost 90 days for these services.
On the other hand, it should be noted that, with regard to freight services payable to linked accounts abroad by local agents, it has been established that they must have a minimum term of 90 days from the date of the effective provision of the service.
Regarding the validations of the Single Foreign Trade Current Account CUCCE, in which financial institutions must record and validate payment transactions for goods and services, since May 26 there have been multiple problems registering transactions since transactions in cross-currency could not be authorized, that is, for example, if the SIRA or the dispatch is in dollars but the transfer of foreign currency abroad is made in euros, the CUCCE does not allow the transaction to be registered, resulting in an inconsistency.
This has caused multiple delays in payments for goods abroad until AFIP, after two months, corrected the error.
Starting in June of this year, the CUCCE began to show another error that persists to this day, which is that it does not validate beyond the FOB value plus 15% or, in some cases, the FOB value plus 10% without being able to know what the logic of application of said percentages is.
This means that AFIP CUCCE does not recognise a payment that includes Incoterm conditions CFR, CIF, CPT, CIP. It also does not recognise the currency adjustments to be included in the shipments to the market or the DDP or DDU expenses that are invoiced in the event that these Incoterm conditions are invoiced.
A percentage is applied at discretion without taking into account that in the exchange rate regulation Text Ordering Camex the invoiced value from abroad must be respected according to the Incoterm condition agreed between the parties.
This situation of rejections due to the excess of FOB value in the CUCCE brings with it that the import payment operation that complies with all the required requirements (SIRA, dispatch to the market, term of access to the exchange market fulfilled, commercial invoice, bill of lading, prior scheduling of 48 hours before the BCRA) is rejected by financial entities to importing clients since since they have requested the SIRA they have spent months doing paperwork to be able to pay through the exchange market to comply with foreign suppliers.
All these issues of delays in SIRA approvals for payment of goods, which once approved the payment terms are 60, 90, 180 and 365 days depending on the type of company, which force having to request financing from foreign suppliers and now added to the problems of validation of the Single Foreign Trade Current Account CUCCE for an amount that does not exceed the FOB value plus a discretionary percentage in addition to the delays in SIRASE approvals for payment of services that do not have the date of said approval, cause delays in payments abroad.
These daily complications in accessing the exchange market are little known and are not simple system problems. In reality, they are methods used to delay payments abroad as much as possible and thus gain time. All of this is done without issuing any exchange or tax regulations and thus unpaid debts abroad accumulate without having to assume the political cost of regulatory bodies.
Furthermore, it is very difficult to explain to importing clients the rejections and the reasons that cause them when there is no associated exchange regulation.
We hope that all these anomalies will be regularized, that foreign trade will be normalized for both exports and imports of goods and that our country will once again be inserted in the world.
As a reminder, we point out that on the Friday before the 2019 PASO, the BCRA reserves were USD 66.309 million and currently, as of 19/07/2023, they are USD 25.762 million, meaning that the exchange and para-exchange regulations are not effective in maintaining foreign currency reserves in the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic.
On the other hand, experts believe that during the last year, debts for import payments amounting to almost USD 14.900 billion have accumulated.
He is a certified public accountant from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). He has a postgraduate degree in Finance from the Universidad Argentina de Empresas (UADE). Currently, he is Head of the Comex Technical Area at Banco Santander Argentina, since 1987. He also serves as Secretary of the Comex Commission at the Association of Argentine Banks (ABA), since 2011. He has been married for 34 years to Adriana Barsanti, and has three children aged 33, 31 and 26, all professionals.