Caputo presents today the project to whiten mattress dollars

This Wednesday, Javier Milei’s government will take a key step in its economic plan: Economy Minister Luis Caputo will present in a press conference the details of the project to modify the Tax Innocence Law. The initiative, which will be sent to Congress in the coming days, aims to whiten the famous «mattress dollars,» those green bills that Argentines keep undeclared.

The goal is clear: to get those funds into the formal system and invested in the real economy. Caputo has been working on the draft with a group of accountants and tax experts since last week, and one of the strongest requests from the sector was the postponement of the sworn declaration. But that is not the only change.

Among the modifications being considered is the elimination of income and asset caps to expand the pool of adherents. That is, any person, regardless of how much they have, can join the whitening. Also, the so-called «significant discrepancy» would be adjusted, a concept that generates fear that the tax authority will question differences between declared and actual amounts. Additionally, more instances of rectification would be added before losing benefits, limits on the use of presumptions by ARCA, and banking rules for operations.

The technical objective of the project is to reduce the fear that those who enter the regime will end up exposed to broad audits of previous years due to formal errors, differences in criteria, or minor inconsistencies. In plain language: that people dare to take the dollars out from under the mattress without fear that ARCA will come down on them with everything.

Caputo’s press conference is scheduled for the afternoon of this Wednesday, and the minister is expected to detail the key points of the initiative. The government is betting heavily that this whitening will be a success, although the context is different: with inflation that does not let up and a blue dollar that keeps rising, confidence in the peso is minimal.

Milei, for his part, had already anticipated during the campaign that he would promote a deep tax reform, and this modification to the Tax Innocence Law is the first step. The opposition is already preparing to question the project, arguing that it benefits evaders and does not solve the underlying problems. But the ruling party defends the measure as a tool to revive the economy and add foreign currency to the Central Bank.

The fine details will be known this afternoon, but what is already known is that the project seeks to be more flexible than the previous one, with fewer bureaucratic obstacles and more incentives for Argentines to take the dollars out of the mattress and put them to work. Will they succeed? The ball is in Congress’s court, and the tug-of-war is just beginning.