Couture, the great dean of the Faculty of Law of the UdelaR, used to remind us that lawsuits are won or lost in the lawsuit. And we add: they are also won or lost in the details of the lawsuit, in aspects that do not make the substance but the procedure and the forms.
This is supported by the high number of cases that recurrently land in the jurisdictional courts, in which it is discussed whether or not the notifications of the tax administrations were correctly practiced.
The case we are discussing illustrates the point. On the occasion, the taxpayer had attacked the decision of the DGI that determined the tax to be paid and imposed fines and surcharges. To dismiss the defense, the DGI maintained -among others- that the appeals should be dismissed for having been filed after the deadline. Because although the taxpayer had filed the appeals within 10 days of the notification, he had computed the latter from the notification made at the address constituted by the taxpayer before the RUT (Single Tax Registry). In the opinion of the DGI, those 10 days should have been computed from the notification made – several months earlier – at the address established in the file itself. The taxpayer, on the other hand, argued that although he had indicated a certain address in the file, he had subsequently modified the address established before the RUT; and since this is the last in time, it was this that should prevail.
The matter reached the Contentious Administrative Court (“TCA”), which rejected the taxpayer’s thesis and ruled in favor of the DGI. The TCA ruled that although it was correct that the domicile established before the RUT had been modified, that modification could not distort the notifications previously made at the last domicile constituted for the purposes of the administrative file (which in the case was different from the domicile constituted before the RUT). The TCA recalled that according to Art. 51 of the Tax Code, resolutions must be notified “… at the office or at the address established in the file; in the absence of the latter, in the registered address and in the absence of both, in the tax domicile”. Thus, in the opinion of the TCA, the order of priority established in the Tax Code had been strictly respected in the case. This being the case, this criterion was the one that should prevail in the dispute.
