Stamp Tax and copartipation tax system

On June 24, 2003, the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice accepted its original jurisdiction to solve two similar claims initiated by a company against the Province of Salta (see “Volkswagen S.A. de Ahorro para Fines Determinados c/ Salta, Provincia de s/ acción declarativa”). The company held that the application of a provincial stamp tax to some proposals to participate in certain saving plans, claimed by the province, violated, among others, the rules of the coparticipation tax system. The Court confirmed the criterion it had adopted originally in the “El Condor Empresa de Transporte S.A. c/ Provincia de Buenos Aires” case, dated December 7, 2001, in the sense that since the constitutional reform of 1994, the treatment of the coparticipation tax system has received a constitutional nature, and a violation by a province opens its original jurisdiction.

Before the aforementioned 2001 decision, except for some cases, the Court had rejected its original jurisdiction because the law-agreements executed by the Federal Government and the provinces that established coparticipation regimes were considered part of the local public law of each province. Therefore, its infringement did not authorize the original jurisdiction of the Court, instead, it was required to go through the corresponding lower courts. The constitutional reform of 1994 modified this classification, giving a constitutional position to the coparticipation tax system, so that an infringement, as explained here, opens the original jurisdiction of the Court.