Puerto Rico News: Country Works to Crack Down on Tax Evaders By Making Providers Accept At Least Two Types of Payments
Puerto Rico's governor, Alejandro García-Padilla, has just signed a law that will require service providers to accept at least two different types of payments.
The new law, which is an effort to crack down on tax evaders, applies to anyone who needs a license or legal authorization in order to provide services. In the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, it is a common practice for doctors, lawyers and other professionals working in the Commonwealth to accept cash only.
Approved on Wednesday, the Treasury Department now has three months to implement the measure.
As reported by The Associated Press, the government of Puerto Rico has as of right now only a 56 percent "capture" rate on all the tax revenues that should be collected.
Puerto Rico has been changing quite a bit under Alejandro García-Padilla.
On March 20, it was announced that the Puerto Rican government would no longer defend a law that bans same-sex couples from marrying and would not recognize the validity of such marriages performed in other jurisdictions.
Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla said, in a statement reported in Reuters, that there was an undeniable consensus “that does not allow discriminatory distinctions as that contained in our Civil Code with respect to the rights of same sex couples."
His decision was an unpopular one in the mostly Catholic territory of Puerto Rico.
Perhaps the Governor is shaking things up before he is forced to leave office.
Since its Feb. 18 inception, a White House petition that demands that the federal government depose of Gov. Alejandro García-Padilla has accumulated 104,000 signatures.
As reported in the Huffington Post, the big complaint against García-Padilla is his promotion of the passage of value-added taxes onto products between the time that they get to Puerto Rico and the time that the goods are sold.
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