What happens if a company doesn't pay a Sunafil fine?

The debt isn’t collectible from the day of the resolution

A Sunafil fine isn’t immediately collectible. It first has to become final (the company didn’t appeal in time) or consented (the administrative process was exhausted, including Sunafil’s own Tribunal de Fiscalización Laboral if the case reached it). Only then does the debt move to an enforcement officer.

The 7 business days that actually matter

Once the coercive-collection order is notified, seven (7) business days start running to pay in full or request an installment plan (Law No. 26979, Article 14). This is the deadline to watch at this stage — not the deadline to appeal the fine itself, which has already passed by the time a case reaches here.

What the officer can seize, with no judge involved

Law 26979 (Article 33) gives the enforcement officer four forms of seizure, and more than one can be used at once:

• Account freeze (retención) — an order to banks to freeze and transfer funds from the company’s accounts up to the amount owed.
• Registry lien (inscripción) — liens recorded against real estate or vehicles in the public registry (SUNARP).
• Intervention (intervención) — in the business’s collections, records, or administration; in practice, this can mean an official withholding a percentage of daily income.
• Deposit or seizure (depósito o secuestro) — of assets, for later auction if the funds in accounts aren’t enough. The auction follows the Civil Procedure Code’s rules (Article 21).

None of these measures need prior judicial authorization.

The debt grows: procedural costs

The enforcement officer settles the procedure’s costs against the approved fee schedule (Article 10), and the company pays those costs on top of the original fine.

Before it gets there: the installment plan

Specialist sources report that Sunafil lets a company split debts exceeding 30% of the current UIT into up to 24 monthly installments (updated debt of 10 UIT or less) or 36 installments (over 10 UIT), with a minimum monthly payment of 5% of the UIT and a reported interest rate of 80% of the current TIM. Unlike what’s reported for Indecopi’s installment plan, these same sources don’t mention Sunafil requiring a bank guarantee. We could not read the official resolution governing this — treat these figures as a reference point and confirm them directly with Sunafil before planning your payments.

Where Sunafil actually differs from Indecopi: credit-bureau reporting

This is the real difference from the equivalent Indecopi page. A news report states that Sunafil has its own directive authorizing it to report companies with unpaid debts to private credit bureaus (like Infocorp or Equifax) on a monthly basis, in both the ordinary and coercive-collection stages. The same report states that Indecopi, acting as the commission that rules on bureaucratic barriers, concluded that Sunafil has no legal-rank rule authorizing it to demand payment that way, and declared the practice an illegal bureaucratic barrier — at least for the specific company that filed the complaint.

We could not confirm with a second independent source whether that Indecopi ruling clears the practice for every company or only the one that complained — that depends on whether the barrier was declared illegal in a general Sunafil disposition or only in a concrete administrative act aimed at that one company. If your company gets threatened with a credit-bureau report from Sunafil, this precedent is a starting point to push back on, not a guarantee it won’t happen.

Suing in court doesn’t freeze collection by itself

Just like with Indecopi, challenging Sunafil’s resolution through judicial review does not automatically suspend coercive collection. To stop it, a judge has to grant a precautionary measure, which in practice usually requires posting a counter-guarantee (often a bank guarantee) for the full amount of the fine.