Senator: Incentives law fuels island’s economic divide

Sen. Ada Álvarez Conde

By THE STAR STAFF

Sen. Ada Álvarez Conde on Thursday revealed the findings of a request for information (2025-0114) she authored along with other recent data regarding Law 60, which she asserted has become a direct subsidy to inequality, granting millionaire tax exemptions to resident investors without requiring them to create significant jobs for Puerto Rico.

Álvarez Conde revealed that the fiscal cost of Law 60 exceeds $7.462 billion, funds that the government recognizes as money that the state chose not to collect -- while schools close, hospitals collapse and municipalities run out of essential income. The Department of Economic Development and Commerce, through an analysis commissioned to the firm Abexus Analytics, established that for fiscal year 2016, the incentives cost the government about $7.4 billion, but if that were not enough, the Treasury Department’s Tax Expenditure Report estimates that revenue losses exceed $18 billion, the senator said.

“While Puerto Rico faces one of the highest poverty rates and our youth can’t afford to buy their first home, in addition, we are debating where the money for the municipalities, since the government gives ultra-millionaire individuals a 0% tax on their passive income, without the obligation to create any employment,” Álvarez Conde said. “That is tax injustice; it is complicity and they want to extend it.”

Supervision of the incentive decrees has been deficient after 12 years, the senator added.

“The country must know that they have already identified more than 2,000 non-compliances between current decrees of millionaires protected by Law 60, and only 317 have been revoked,” the senator said. “The government knows and the government has not acted. I am acting.”

Álvarez Conde noted that the information received through the resolution reveals that from 2020 to 2025, 10,350 decrees were granted, of which about 3,464 were for individual investors.

“The bona fide farmer creates more jobs, the tourism sector creates more jobs … but those who benefit most from the tax system are those who contribute the least,” she said. “That is the inconvenient truth they want to silence.”