Gabriel Boric’s government asked Javier Etcheberry, director of the, after a public who did not pay a house registered in his name for nine years. The departure will be effective on Tuesday and Carolina Saravia, current deputy director of SII control, will assume the position in a subrogate manner. Etcheberry, who led the fight and from the government institution, had pledged to settle the debt of the house, a rural city located one hour south of Santiago. The opposition pressures, however, did not cease and the left -wing administration finally requested the resignation to “protect the proper functioning of the service in a context of”.
The leadership of the SII of the Industrial Civil Engineer, of Centroiz left, had been his return to public service and a position he exercised in the return to democracy. In the nineties, Etcheberry was director of the same agency, responsible for the collection of taxes in Chile for more than a decade, where he stood out for modernizing the government agency. This work was exercised under the presidencies of the left of, and, until the latter appointed it in 2002 Biministro of Public Works and Transportation and Telecommunications. His next step was Banco Estado’s executive presidency for two years, and then devoted himself to his businesses in the private world. In 2024, the Boric government appointed him again director of the SII, a position that is running through a public tender carried out by senior public management.
On Monday a 24 -hour television report announced that Etcheberry had not paid the contributions of his home of Paine for nine years, and that, according to documents achieved through transparency, in the field there is only one property of 213 square meters, but that in reality there are two constructions, in addition to a swimming pool, which were not regularized in the municipality. The property, whose 50% belong to Etcheberry and the other half to his wife, had a fiscal appraisal in the SII, as of June 2025, exceeding 158 million Chilean pesos (about 164,000 dollars). Since the information was known, the opposition requested its departure for considering that the person responsible for the agency that controls taxes could not present this type of irregularities. The candidate on the left, recognizing her contributions, said: “I think it is in it to take as soon as possible one step to the side.”
At first, Boric Finance Minister Mario Marcel defended Etcheberry “to maintain the executive’s confidence regarding his position.” In response to the controversy, the director of the SII reported that he would pay the taxes corresponding to the nine years of debt and the difference in contributions for the extensions he had made to his property, renouncing the maximum limit of three years of retroactivity that determines the law on incorporations of constructions not registered in the cadastre. The decision was not enough, and the pressures to leave the position by a sector of the left and the right, continued.
On Friday night, the Ministry of Finance reported that, commissioned by President Buric, Minister Marcel requested the resignation of Etcheberry: “Such a decision was based on the analysis of the information delivered by Etcheberry regarding the efforts made for the update of the appraisal of his property in the commune of Paine and the need to protect the proper functioning of the service in a context of growing political tension.” In the statement, Marcel highlighted the trajectory of the director of the outgoing SII and his “great commitment” to the public service. “He carried out excellent management during the last year, strengthening the tasks of tax control and collaboration in the fight against organized crime, using both their knowledge and experience and the tools delivered by the Tax Compliance Law for that purpose. As a result, the tax collection has significantly improved and numerous tax evasion operations were detected,” said the minister.
The news was well received in general by the political world, who saw their continuity “unsustainable” for the type of tax irregularity. In addition, in a context where the presidential candidacies of the right, in particular that of Republican José Antonio Kast, advocate eliminating the payment of contributions to the first home, a measure rejected from the ruling party. In other sectors, such as the academic, there were objections to the request for resignation. The Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences University Adolfo Ibañez (UAI), Claudio Sebach, wrote in X: “The departure of Etcheberry is a very sad time for public management and the modernization of the State. It marks a triumph of mediocrity and a defeat of the fight against corruption and organized crime that he was leading from the SII,” he said, on two issues that have marked the political agenda.
In October last year, the Boric government requested the resignation of its security tsar, the then Undersecretary of the Ministry of Interior, Manuel Monsalve, after a complaint for rape filed by an advisor to that portfolio. The former socialist was in one of the most complex moments for Chile, which is going through.
