President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner at the Bicentenary Museum (photo: Maximiliano Luna/Télam/dsl)
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced yesterday that she will send a bill to Congress to modify VAT rates for print media based on company size.
If the bill is passed, companies with annual earnings of up to $63m will pay 2.5% VAT; those with earnings of between $63m and $126m will pay a rate of 5%; and those earning more than $126m per year will continue paying the current rate of 10.5%
The president also announced a new system of repayment facilities for media outlets that have debts with tax agency AFIP, whereby they will be allowed to cancel their debts in exchange for services to the state. This measure will benefit companies with debts of up to $100m. President Fernández explained that this “will allow agencies or producers of audiovisual content to regularise their fiscal situation through the exchange of services, because instead of paying money they will provide services to the national state such as advertisement in their media outlets or other services.”
In the same ceremony, which took place at the Bicentenary Museum, the president announced the creation of a new system to measure TV ratings. It will be called Sifema and will measure ratings throughout the country, as opposed to the current system put in place by private company Ibope which only registers results in the City and Greater Buenos Aires. The technology, however, will be similar to that used by Ibope, consisting of around 9,000 ‘people meters’ installed in people’s homes in the country’s main cities, which will register information such as which TV programmes are watched, for how long, and the age and socioeconomic profile of the audience. Sifema will measure audiences for cable, free-to-air, and digital TV and will be implemented by a group of public universities.
These announcements come a day after another series of policies were unveiled by President Fernández. They include the incorporation of three new free vaccines to the childhood immunisation schedule — against meningococcus, chickenpox, and rotavirus — and a new moratorium which will allow people who have reached retirement age but have not made the necessary contributions to the pension system to retire. This is the second moratorium of its kind — the first one was implemented by former president Néstor Kirchner in 2005 and reached 1.7m people.
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