Juicio de Apremio (Ejecución Fiscal) — How Tax Debt Reaches a Subasta

Argentina (AR) — civil law.

Nothing on this page describes United States practice. There is no certificate sold to an investor, no administrative sale, and no post-sale redemption window in Argentina. If you arrived carrying US assumptions, read falsos-amigos first.

Juicio de apremio

The lawsuit by which a fisco collects an unpaid tax. Also called ejecución fiscal. This is the Argentine answer to the question “what happens if you don’t pay your property tax,” and the answer is: you get sued.

Nothing is sold to an investor at any stage.

The tax claim is never packaged, never certificated, never auctioned to a third party, and never assigned to a private bidder in exchange for an interest rate. The creditor is and remains the fisco, all the way to the subasta. If you are looking for the point in this process where an investor buys the debt, there isn’t one.

Who brings it

• Impuesto inmobiliario — the province (or CABA): ARBA, AGIP, ATM, API, ATER and their 19 sister agencies. See index.
• Tasas (municipal service charges, ABL in CABA) — the municipality, in its own separate file.

These are different creditors with different debts. A property can be current on one and years delinquent on the other.

The steps

1. Delinquency, then certification of the debt by the fisco into a título ejecutivo — a boleta de deuda, certificado de deuda or liquidación.
2. Suit by a representante/apoderado fiscal.
3. Excepciones — the taxpayer’s defences, and they are narrow and enumerated: in substance pago documentado, prescripción, espera documentada, inhabilidad de título, litispendencia. The correctness of the underlying assessment is generally not relitigated here.
4. Sentencia de trance y remate.
5. `Subasta`, if the debt is still unpaid.

The constitutional floor

In `AFIP c/ Intercorp S.R.L.` (CSJN, 2010) the Supreme Court struck down the arrangement under which the national tax authority could order embargos without judicial intervention. The principle — that a fisco must go to a judge before taking property — is the reason the whole of this wiki is about court files.

How far each province may go before involving a judge is a separate, live and province-specific question. It is needs_verification on every jurisdicción page and must not be inferred from the national rule.

Stopping it

Payment, or a plan de pagos with the fisco, is the ordinary exit and remains available well into the process — ARBA, for instance, offers plans at the execution-of-judgment stage on stated terms. See purga-y-el-limite-temporal and detener-la-subasta.