After resale listings for the Bad Bunny farewell shows reached $10,850, the industry asked Hacienda to determine which resale platforms are registered as marketplace facilitators and whether they remit the IVU. The framework that answers the question is already on the books. Hacienda named ticketing platforms marketplace facilitators three years ago, with duties that expressly cover resales of admission rights. The open question is registration and enforcement.
KEY IMPLICATIONS
The Ask Before Hacienda
The petition is specific. The Asociación de Productores y Profesionales del Entretenimiento de Puerto Rico asked Hacienda and DACO for a coordinated intervention to determine which resale platforms are registered as marketplace facilitators, whether they collect and remit the IVU, and how the tax is calculated when a ticket is resold for considerably more than its original price, alongside consumer-facing questions about price transparency, fee disclosure, seller identity, and protections against invalid tickets. The association was careful about scope. Its target is commercial and speculative platform resale, and a person transferring a legitimate ticket they cannot use is outside the complaint. Producer José "Pepe" Dueño framed the equity point directly. Local producers and authorized boleterías comply with refrendo, registration, reporting, and IVU collection, and external platforms earning income from the same events should carry the same responsibilities.
The weekend supplied the urgency. Two criminal complaints were filed in San Juan and Carolina over fraudulent ticket sales, each victim losing hundreds of dollars. And the pattern is familiar. DACO ran a desk operation against resale listings for the same artist's 2024 shows, so the enforcement playbook has a precedent. As of this writing, neither agency has publicly answered the petition.
A Framework Three Years Old
The answer to the petition's first question sits in Hacienda's own publications. Act 40-2020 amended the Código de Rentas Internas to create the facilitador de mercado, defined in Section 4010.01(ddd) as any person that facilitates the sale of tangible property, specified digital products, or taxable services through a marketplace, including a website, and made the facilitator responsible for collecting IVU on every transaction in its marketplace, whether the sale is its own or a third party's. Regulation 9237 of December 2020 built out the articles. Carta Circular 20-40 established registration through SURI and the Relevo de Cobro mechanism that relieves registered marketplace sellers from double collection, and Carta Circular 21-05 set the monthly IVU return reporting for both figures.
Then came the application that decides this debate. Carta Circular 23-10 applied the regime to ticket sellers by name, requiring registration as marketplace facilitators through SURI beginning June 1, 2023, and obligating them to collect and remit IVU on sales and resales of taxable items, admission rights included. The same circular addresses promoters of public spectacles under Section 6080.15, as amended by Act 52-2022, including the Relevo de Cobro path for promoters who sell through registered facilitators. The regulatory architecture the petition invokes was not proposed last week. It has been mandatory for three years.
The Tax Base of a $10,850 Ticket
The petition's hardest-sounding question, how the tax is computed on a marked-up resale, has the simplest answer in the framework's structure. The IVU is a transaction tax on the sales price. When an admission right resells for $10,850, the taxable sale is $10,850, and the combined 11.5 percent applies to that figure. The markup is inside the price, and the price is the base. Carta Circular 23-10 removes the remaining ambiguity by naming resales expressly. A platform that facilitates the transaction is the withholding agent for it, whoever the reseller may be, and a registered reseller's own relief from collection runs through the Relevo mechanism rather than through silence.
The Off-Island Gap
The framework's reach is the point the petition presses. The post-Wayfair architecture that Act 40-2020 adopted ties the obligation to facilitating taxable sales into Puerto Rico, and a platform needs no office on the island to owe registration and collection. Local operators already live under the full stack, refrendo, SURI registration, monthly returns, collection at the point of sale. Whether the off-island platforms listing Puerto Rico inventory at four figures are registered is a records question Hacienda can answer from SURI without new authority, and the answer determines whether the current market runs on a level field or on regulatory arbitrage.
What This Means
For resale platforms with Puerto Rico inventory, the compliance posture is binary. Registration as a facilitador de mercado, collection on the full resale price, monthly reporting, and documentation are existing legal duties, and the current attention makes the cost of the unregistered posture a live enforcement question rather than a theoretical one.
For promoters and venues, the framework is leverage. The Relevo mechanics reward selling through registered facilitators, and any agreement that routes inventory into a resale channel deserves tax compliance representations, audit rights, and indemnities keyed to the facilitator obligations, because the withholding duty follows the marketplace.
For the legislative debate ahead, the starting point matters. The tax lane is occupied by a functioning regime, so the productive questions for any reventa statute are enforcement resources, registration verification, and the consumer-protection layer, rather than rebuilding what Carta Circular 23-10 already built. The firm's analysis of the federal enforcement year and of the BOTS Act maps the parallel federal floor.
Maceira Zayas advises sponsors, promoters, venues, and ticketing platforms on tax compliance and structuring through its Tax practice, and counsels clients engaging with Hacienda and the legislative process through its Government Affairs practice.
Disclosure. Maceira Zayas serves as counsel to the Asociación de Productores y Profesionales del Entretenimiento de Puerto Rico (APPEP), whose petitions are referenced in this article. Anthony O. Maceira Zayas, the firm's founder and managing member, is a founding member of the association.
Simón E. Carlo-Valentín, CPA, MBATax Practice Lead Maceira Zayas · San Juan, Puerto Rico · Washington, D.C.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or tax advice. Receipt of this publication does not create an attorney-client relationship.
