Diario Financiero – Lift of bank secrecy
The Chilean government presented the first set of amendments to the bill dealing with tax compliance. Among these, it is proposed that the IRS will only be able to lift bank secrecy by going to a Tax and Customs Court, in an audit process. In addition, deadlines would be established for the lifting of bank secrecy, and it would be defined that if a taxpayer does not make a statement on bank secrecy, it will be understood that they do not approve of the scrutiny of their information.
Maria Soledad Diharasarri Lecanda, partner in charge of the Tax Department, was interviewed by Diario Financiero, a specialized daily, on the deadlines for lifting bank secrecy included in the amendments. She warns that ‘although the grounds for exempting prior notification seek to streamline the procedure for obtaining information from certain taxpayers, this objective may conflict with the right of defence that all taxpayers should have, therefore it is preferable that the process of lifting bank secrecy should take longer, but that it grants sufficient guarantees of due process’.