The Congress of the Union approved legislative modifications to reduce 38% the TIGIE (Tariff of the Law of the General Taxes of Import and Export), to 7,792 tariff lines.

The Ministry of Economy published on July 1, 2020 the so-called “New LIGIE” (Law of General Import and Export Taxes), which includes these changes.

According to the federal government and the legislators who proposed the New LIGIE, the TIGIE needed to be updated in order to strengthen itself as the instrument of trade facilitation that it should be.

In general, the New LIGIE implements the Sixth Amendment, modernizes a fifth pair of digits, and adjusts the number of tariff lines.

The previous version of the TIGIE consisted of 22 Sections, 98 chapters, 1,231 tariff headings and 5,212 tariff subheadings, accumulating 12,578 tariff fractions.

In general, the fractions have a regulatory nature, since both the tariff and the non-tariff regulations and restrictions (prior permits, maximum quotas, country of origin marking, certifications, compensatory quotas, among others) depend on them. import and export that corresponds to each merchandise, by virtue of the tariff fraction in which it is classified.

New TIGIE

It is also mentioned that it cannot be avoided that another of the relevant aspects given to the TIGIE codes is that they constitute the backbone of the statistical information on merchandise trade in our country, which is why it is considered TIGIE as an indispensable tool for the design of public policy.

Before the changes, there were 4,296 subheadings, in which all the tariff fractions that comprise them have the same tariff level, that is, their creation did not obey a commercial policy but rather the need to identify the goods.

From 2011 to 2017, the TIGIE went from 12,149 to 12,578 tariff sections. The central factor behind this increase has been the industry’s need to statistically monitor specific merchandise, as well as greater precision on other regulations operated from the TIGIE, such as estimated prices.

In the 2013-2017 period alone, 387 tariff fractions were created, of which 97% maintained the same tariff as the tariff fraction from which they originate.