Supreme Decree 153 was published in 2015 to regulate the Special Early Rebate Regime (RERA in the Spanish acronym) applicable to the General Sales Tax (IGV), in order to encourage the purchase of capital goods. A modification was deemed necessary in order to bring it into line with the recently enacted Legislative Decree 1259, which fine-tunes a number of special IGV rebate regimes.

With this in mind, Supreme Decree 128 was published in May, containing new definitions and making some modifications to the articles in SD 153.

The new definitions cover the following terms:

• Income-tax law
• New Simplified Single Regime
• General regime
• Special Income Tax Regime
• SME tax regulations for income tax

There are also changes to articles 2 and 3 of the decree, regulating the scope of the regime and the requisites for taking advantage of it.

Scope of the regime and requirements

The decree defines the scope of the regime for credit rebates of tax generated from imports and/or acquisition of new capital goods, as it applies to those taxpayers whose annual sales are no higher than 300 tax units (UIT).

These annual sales will be calculated by adding together the following items from the last 12 periods of the company’s economic activity prior to the period for which the rebate is being requested, according to the company’s tax regime during these periods:

• Net income over the month,
• Monthly net income from category-three (business) revenues,
• Gross monthly income.

If the company has been operating for less than 12 periods, all the periods since start of trading will be used for the calculation.

In order to claim the tax rebate, taxpayers must be registered as micro or small enterprises on the MSME Register on the date of submitting the application.