IASS: The State Collects First and Corrects Later

The new withholding regime turns retirees and pensioners into advance financiers of the State.

THE TRAP OF THE STATE’S HAND IN SOMEONE ELSE’S POCKET
When Those in Power Assume Your Money Belongs to Them
By Dr Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

There is an old truth in this country, one that we sometimes insist on forgetting but that reality, sooner or later, ends up throwing back in our faces: the State does not produce a single peso.
Everything the State spends and everything it distributes must first be taken from someone.
Today, unfortunately, the sophistication of the tax collector has reached such a point that it no longer waits for citizens to come forward and pay; it reaches into their pockets before the money even reaches their hands. It is sheer madness!
Look at what is happening to our retirees, to people who contributed throughout their lives and worked from dawn to dusk for forty or fifty years, trusting in the promise that the contributions deducted for their retirement protected the value of their efforts.
Now it turns out that if someone had the audacity to work in two different places, or if a widow receives the pension to which she is legally and rightfully entitled, the computer system—that perfect little machine that cross-checks everything—sounds the alarm and cries: “Watch out, this person is earning too much!”
But this has gone far beyond the limits of what is tolerable! Now, under a new regime announced by the tax authorities, the revenue-collecting bureaucracy has come up with another stroke of genius.
Apparently, collecting the balance at the end of the fiscal year is no longer enough. No, sir! They are in a tremendous hurry. They need cash, so they begin deducting the accumulated difference ten months before the end of the year—five months before the date on which people had previously been required to make that payment in order to finance the State’s chronic deficit.
They confiscate retirees’ money in advance to swell the State’s coffers while those same retirees must figure out how to make ends meet.
The final insult in this abuse is the arrogance of the system.
The minister says that the measure is intended to prevent people from forgetting to pay and consequently incurring fines and surcharges. But if the State’s little machine makes a mistake—because systems fail, bureaucracies make errors and databases are incorrectly cross-referenced—they could not care less. They do not wait for you to file your tax return so that the mistake can be corrected.
No! First they reach into your pension, deduct the money and leave your household budget trembling. Then… then they will see. You must queue, fill out forms and politely ask them to return what they wrongly took from you. The principle is simple: “First I charge you, and if I made a mistake, take it up with Gardel.”
It is the world turned upside down! If you suffer financial hardship or a family tragedy, a private creditor must take the circumstances into account or go to court. They must respect the legally protected portion of your income and listen to your arguments. The State does not. The State collects first, automatically, directly and without anaesthetic, because it appoints itself the principal partner in your life—but only in your gains, never in your losses.
When illness or a serious unforeseen event strikes, the deduction from your pension continues to fall like a guillotine, now reinforced by this heavy-handed regime.
I have said it a thousand times: the countries that prosper are those that leave money in people’s hands, because people know better than anyone how to spend what is theirs, care for their loved ones and invest to increase their own prosperity and, with it, the economy for everyone’s benefit.
When the tax collector becomes so efficient that it can anticipate and siphon off every difference in salaries or pensions before citizens can even buy their medication, what we are creating is not social justice. It is individual suffocation.
We must rebel against this cold, bureaucratic logic of revenue collection. Technology must serve citizens’ freedom, not perfect the art of emptying older people’s pockets five months ahead of time and by force, merely because the tax collector can compel them to advance money that will ultimately be confiscated.
Either we reduce the cost of this omnipresent and voracious State, or the State will end up devouring the future of every Uruguayan.
It is as simple as that!

Advance IASS withholdings
Taxpayer vulnerability
Technology serving tax collection

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