26/01/2015
The El Salvadoran Ministers of Finance and Education signed an agreement, reached with the support of EUROsociAL
Tax education is present in all grades in primary and secondary school in the country
From April 2008 to date, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Education of El Salvador have maintained a very important social partnership that has enabled the execution of various projects aimed at promoting a new tax culture. As a result, tax education is present in all grades in primary and secondary school in the Central American country and, since 2009, the two institutions have jointly organized diploma programmes and free courses for teachers, visits to leisure-educational spaces for tax education and tax culture week, among other events. All of these advances led to the Tax Education Programme in 2011 winning the National Prize for Innovation and Best Practices in Quality awarded by the President of the Republic.
Nevertheless, to consolidate the gains achieved and seek increased collaboration in the future, it became necessary to work on formalizing this cooperation through an institutional agreement. In doing so, the El Salvadoran Ministry of Finance, within the framework of the EUROsociAL II programme, was supported by the Peruvian National Superintendency of Customs and Tax Administration (SUNAT), an institution that has an agreement with its country’s Ministry of Education (MINEDU).
The exchange of experiences was a great help to the El Salvadoran Ministry of Finance in forming a detailed vision of the nature, structure and content of these types of agreements. All of these inputs were incorporated into a first draft of the agreement presented to the authorities of the El Salvadoran Ministry of Education, culminating in the signing of the agreement.
The agreement, signed in December 2014 by Education Minister Carlos Mauricio Canjura and Finance Minister Carlos Enrique Cáceres Chávez, establishes the fundamental inter-agency cooperation framework to be used for implementing actions that contribute to creating tax awareness among students, teachers, professionals and others. Given its nature and important role in implementing the State policy, the agreement will be in effect indefinitely.
This activity is framed in the line of work of EUROsociAL, the cooperation programme of the European Commission, entitled “Strengthening of Tax Education Programmes in Latin America” being coordinated by the FIIAPP with its operational partner the El Salvadoran Ministry of Finance.
