Autonomía tributaria municipal en Colombia, un paso hacia la descentralización fiscal

Abstract

This work stems from a tension experienced daily in municipal administrations: the 1991 Constitution proclaims a decentralized state and recognizes the autonomy of municipalities, but in practice, this autonomy clashes with legal and institutional limitations that render it meaningless. My research analyzes precisely the extent of this autonomy in tax matters and how it can be strengthened. Research question: Which legal and tax institutions in the management of the unified property tax and the industry and commerce tax allow for strengthening municipal fiscal autonomy in Colombia to improve revenue collection efficiency, while respecting the constitutional limits of the principle of legality and the unitary state model? The general objective was to analyze the legal and tax institutions specific to municipalities—with an emphasis on the unified property tax and the industry and commerce tax—with three interconnected purposes: first, to determine their actual scope within the unitary state; second, to identify the legal and procedural factors that limit their revenue collection efficiency; and third, to formulate well-founded proposals to strengthen them. That is to say: to diagnose the scope, explain the shortcomings, and propose solutions, always within the current constitutional framework. • First: to determine the legal scope of autonomy in relation to the principles of legality and statutory reservation, establishing the limits of the derived taxing power and the authority of municipal councils. • Second: to legally analyze property tax and the Industry and Commerce Tax (ICA) as the main local taxes, with emphasis on the problems of their tax base, rates, oversight, and collection. • Third: to identify the procedural aspects that affect efficiency—oversight, official determination, appeals, enforced collection, and cadastral management—based on the diagnosis of the Commission for the Study of the Territorial Tax System. • Fourth: to formulate legally sound proposals to strengthen municipal tax institutions within the constitutional framework. The methodology. The design is dogmatic-legal, with a qualitative approach and inductive reasoning, because the object of study—the real scope of autonomy—requires examining the sources of the legal system: constitutional, statutory, jurisprudential, and doctrinal, and contrasting them with technical data. Results: 1. Autonomy is derived, not original. 2. Property tax depends on the cadastre; the Industry and Commerce Tax (ICA) depends on territoriality and informality. 3. There is a structural gap between the law and actual capacity. 4. The proposals operate within the current framework. Municipal tax autonomy has a real, but limited, legal scope; it is exercised in administration, oversight, collection, and the setting of rates authorized by law, not in the creation of the tax. The second, and most relevant for public policy, finding is that the obstacle is not normative. The legal tools already exist; the real challenge is to strengthen the institutional, administrative, and technical capacity of municipalities to effectively exercise the powers that the Constitution and the law already recognize. In short, Colombia doesn't need more rules: it needs municipalities capable of enforcing the ones it has.