COMAP, explained from Salto.

Law 16,906, of January 1998, declares the promotion and protection of investment to be in the national interest and creates the application commission, COMAP: the Ministry of Economy, which coordinates it, plus Industry, Agriculture, Labour, Environment, the planning office (OPP) and the Decentralisation Commission. The company files a project, COMAP scores it and recommends, and the executive declares it promoted. Article 16 of the law already says that projects contributing to decentralisation receive higher benefits in length or amount.

The regulation in force is Decree 329/025, signed on 23 December 2025 and effective from 1 February 2026, which replaced Decree 268/020. What changed, in short: micro and small companies add 15 percentage points of exemption and two more years, with no investment cap keeping them out; medium companies of up to 50 employees add 10 points and one year; large projects (over 180 million indexed units, UI) filed before the end of 2027 can reach 100% exemption; the time allowed to execute the investment fell from ten years to five; and the scoring matrix was reweighted, with decentralisation dropping from 15% to 10%. The operating detail is in the General Operating Criteria of 29 May 2026.

Salto has 8 points at a 10% weight: 0.8 weighted points that Montevideo does not get. A project scoring 4 weighted points in Montevideo gets a 53% income-tax exemption; the same project in Salto scores 4.8 and gets 60%: 6.2 percentage points more of the investment deducted from the tax.

On the period, that same project, in the 16-year bracket, goes from 8 to 9 years to use the benefit. And civil works are exempt from wealth tax for 10 years instead of 8, regardless of the score.

Under the previous decree the bonus was larger: Salto had 10 points at a 15% weight, 1.5 weighted points. Decree 329/025 gave it 8 points at 10%. The gap with Montevideo, which went from 4 points to 0, is still what makes the difference.

Uruguay is not an OECD member and has not applied to be one. As of 30 September 2026 there is no formal application, no accession process opened by the Council, no roadmap and no committees assigned. What there is, with dates: in December 2025 minister Oddone revived in Paris a work agenda dormant since 2020; on 9 April 2026 the Ministry of Economy requested, for the first time, an OECD Economic Survey of Uruguay, two years long and financed by the IDB, to measure the distance between Uruguayan rules and the organisation's standards; the OECD proposed a memorandum of understanding the government has not yet signed; and on 28 and 29 September the secretary-general, Mathias Cormann, was in Montevideo and said the memorandum does not mean starting an accession process, and that past accessions took three to five years. The Ministry of Economy itself sums up the relationship in three strands: the global minimum tax, a technical programme on the labour market and quality employment with the planning office (OPP) and the training institute (INEFOP), and the economic survey; and it recalls that Uruguay has been a full member of the OECD Development Centre since 2015 and has adhered to the international tax-transparency frameworks since 2009. The government will open a debate on the relationship in early 2027 (MEF, 28 September; Búsqueda, 24 September; En Perspectiva, 29 September; Búsqueda, 28 September).

What does tie COMAP to the OECD is written in two places. The first is the global minimum tax, the OECD's Pillar Two: Law 20,446, of December 2025, created the domestic minimum top-up tax, which makes multinational groups with revenue above 750 million euros pay an effective 15% rate in Uruguay, and Decree 206/026, of August 2026, adjusted how companies with fiscal-stability clauses are compensated. The Ministry of Economy said on 28 September that the OECD qualification of that tax is in its final stage, for formal integration in 2027. The effect on COMAP is concrete and narrow: for a multinational of that size, any income-tax exemption beyond the 15% margin is offset by the top-up tax; for every other company, which is almost every project that goes through COMAP, nothing changes (EY, January 2026; Decree 206/026; La Mañana, July 2026).

The second is what the OECD has already said about the regime. Uruguay has adhered since February 2021 to the OECD Declaration on International Investment and Multinational Enterprises, and sits on the Investment Committee for that declaration. In its Investment Policy Review of Uruguay, from 2021, the OECD described COMAP as a project-by-project incentive, put the cost of Law 16,906 at 0.2% of GDP in 2017, and recommended streamlining the incentive schemes, publishing what they cost and granting incentives only by law. If Uruguay ever entered an accession process, that committee and the fiscal-affairs committee would review this regime: that is how every accession works. But that is what would happen, not what is happening: no government or OECD document links Decree 329/025 to accession.

The Ministry of Economy's spreadsheets do not carry each project's department, so the Salto projects cannot be counted. By company name, 2026 shows the Club Remeros Salto (tourism, US$1.65 million, May) and two projects from the Sanatorio Médico Quirúrgico de Salto (about US$200,000 each, June). That is a sample by name, not a departmental figure. The last official split dates from 2022: 69% of promoted investment in the interior, 31% in Montevideo.

In the north, the two large projects of these two years are HIF in Paysandú (US$5,385 million, synthetic fuels) and BrasPine in Rivera (US$237 million, pine timber). Projects filed, which outnumber those recommended, were 1,991 in 2025 for US$14,626 million and 1,175 in the first half of 2026 for US$3,120 million (la diaria, 10 August 2026).