Tax Administrations' Rules: Discard the use of paper as documentary support

Although throughout history the natural support for documents was on paper, the truth is that this system has major disadvantages against new and better ways using computerized document management systems, including:

1. is prone to counterfeiting.
2. It cannot be easily indexed (it can be indexed by hand, but at a very high cost), which generates unnecessary human input for its processing and prevents process automation.
3. It is a support that does not allow you to easily obtain backups of it (except for photocopies), so the loss or degradation of it requires requesting copies from the other party (in this case, the economic actor), with the risks that this entails.
4. It is a medium that makes transparency difficult, since there can only be n copies of a file at the same time.

On the other hand, there are new methodologies that allow not only to guarantee the authenticity of the documents in it, but also in a transparent way for the end user, allowing these documents to be viewed from anywhere. In the same way, the documents included in these methodologies usually force a predefined structure (in other words, forms), which allows the automation of processes and indexing by different fields, which allows a fast and efficient operation and better auditing.

However, such methodologies have an Achilles heel in paper-based documents, since they are completely blind to them.

This and other principles are available in the book Principios de Administración Tributaria published by Thomson Reuters - La Ley.