In Mexico, Artists Can Pay Taxes with Artwork Eva Hershaw - The Atlantic
go to original April 11, 2014

Antonio ‘Gritón’ Ortiz beside one of his conceptual nudes in his Mexico City apartment studio. (Eva Hershaw)

... For the past 28 years, Antonio ‘Gritón’ Ortiz has not paid a dime to the Tax Administration Service (SAT), the Mexican equivalent of the IRS. But he is no criminal. In fact, in a country that has lost an estimated $872 billion to money laundering and tax evasion over the past four decades, Gritón is in good standing with the law. Like more than 700 artists across Mexico, he takes part in a Pago en Especie (Payment in Kind) program—the only one of its type in the world—that allows artists to pay federal income taxes with their own artwork.
In 1957, David Alfaro Siqueiros made a proposal to keep a fellow artist out of jail for tax evasion: Let him pay his debt in art.

The program was hatched in 1957, in the throes of the so-called “Mexican Miracle,” a period of 40 years that saw sustained annual economic growth of between 3 and 4 percent. As legend has it, muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of the most influential artists of his generation, approached the secretariat of finance in 1957 with a proposal to keep a friend and fellow artist out of jail for tax evasion: Let him pay his debt in art. The agreement laid the foundation for Pago en Especie, which today is a public collection of nearly 7,000 paintings, sculptures, and graphics accepted as tax payments from some of Mexico’s best-known artists.

... In a country where 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, paying little or no taxes, and another 30 percent earns a living in the informal market, economists have estimated that the tax burden rests on a mere 20 percent of the population. Mexico has the weakest tax revenues in the 34-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and one of the lowest rates of tax revenue in all of Latin America.

Read the rest at The Atlantic

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