Hope for children in the face of the Solid Waste Law

Given the inequitable treatment it would impose on companies subject to the new tax—by failing to respect proportionality about their income—everything indicates that the legislator, when approving the General Law on Comprehensive Management and Co-processing of Solid Waste 225-20 (still pending promulgation by the Executive Branch), forgot an essential truth: when the law strays from justice, it becomes an edge without a scale, a shadow without a soul.

According to established rates, the smaller the company, the greater the proportional burden it must assume. As Fernando Pinales, President of Codopyme, rightly points out, it’s as if the law were punishing micro, small, and medium-sized businesses simply for being of that size.

According to figures provided by Iván de Jesús García, President of the Dominican Federation of Merchants, the distortions are evident: companies with annual revenues between 8 and 10 million pesos will go from paying 5,000 to 20,000 pesos.
Those with revenues between 20 and 50 million pesos will see their rates increase from 30,000 to 155,000 pesos. Those with annual revenues between 50 million and 100 million pesos will now pay 260,000 pesos, instead of 90,000 pesos.

Finally, companies with revenues exceeding 100 million pesos are required to pay 275,000 pesos.

This means that a company with a turnover of 100 million pesos will pay the same as one with a turnover of 10 billion pesos, with the rates bearing no relation to the quantity or toxicity of the waste generated.

Faced with this evident disproportion, the hope of MSMEs—at least that is what two of their most prominent representatives, Iván de Jesús García and Fernando Pinales, express—is that the President of the Republic, Luis Abinader, will refrain from enacting a law that, not having been born from the heart of justice, would only flourish as a thorn in the garden of the people.