The Buenos Aires province will continue to monitor the origin of large quantities of money and collect taxes as necessary, despite the national government’s new regulations that encourage people to bring informal cash into the financial system — no questions asked.

Cristian Girard, head of the Buenos Aires Tax Agency (ARBA, by its Spanish initials), said that the agency “continues to work normally, applying the same control criteria” as before, and said that provincial taxes will not be affected.

“Controls are still in full force, because the obligation to pay taxes depending on the capability to contribute has not changed,” he said, according to an ARBA press release on Monday.

Girard questioned the new national regime aimed at remonetizing the economy based largely on loosening large swathes of financial reporting requirements and restrictions on common transactions, saying it “lacks juridical security.”

He added that there have not been substantial changes to tax obligations. “There are no concrete modifications in normative terms,” Girard said, adding that the measure “seems more of an electoral promise rather than a tax policy.”

According to Girard, the national government has only made modifications to regulations that deal with the information tax payers have to provide the state, and the creation of a simplified income tax regime, where people will no longer have to give information on changes to their assets.

“They are framing it as a reparation for people who had savings, but it’s actually a covert amnesty mechanism that allows to make undeclared funds legal,” Girard said. “But the current criminal law on taxes and laws on prevention of money laundering are still intact. That leaves tax payers in a legal limbo, because they are not specifying whether this will have retroactive effects or its real limits.”

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For Girard, the situation will remain “uncertain” unless Congress approves a law on it. “This is no amnesty nor a new fiscal order. The only certainty is that ARCA — Argentina’s federal tax agency — will stop making controls.”

In the same line, Buenos Aires governor Axel Kicillof said on Monday morning that “the norms regarding investigations on the origin of assets remain the same” and that “the only thing that appears to have changed is the information regime for different transactions” that previously emitted alerts for unjustified expenditures after a certain threshold.

“People won’t be exempt from giving explanations. When they eventually declare their assets, they will have to explain the origin of those funds, because they have to pay taxes based on those assets,” Kicillof said.