What happens if a company doesn't pay an Indecopi fine?

The debt doesn’t become collectible on the day of the resolution

An Indecopi 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 Indecopi’s own Tribunal if the case reached it). Only then does the debt become collectible and get handed to an enforcement officer.

The 7 business days that actually matter

Once the debt moves to coercive collection, the enforcement officer issues and notifies a Resolución de Ejecución Coactiva (REC). From that notice, seven (7) business days start running to pay in full or request an installment plan (Law No. 26979, Article 14). This is the real deadline a company needs to watch — not the deadline to appeal the fine itself, which has already passed by the time a case reaches this stage.

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. That’s the key difference from collecting a debt between private parties.

The debt grows: costs and fees

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. We did not find an article in Law 26979 that separately establishes default interest on the fine itself — if your own notice mentions one, check it against the specific resolution you received, since that may come from the norm that imposed the fine rather than the coercive-collection law itself.

Before it gets there: the installment plan

Indecopi has its own regulation for paying a fine in installments. Specialist sources report that once the remaining balance after the first payment exceeds a threshold of 5 UIT, a bank guarantee is required as collateral. We could not read Indecopi’s own resolution setting this figure directly, so treat it as a reference point and confirm it in the application before planning your payments around it.

Suing Indecopi doesn’t freeze collection by itself

A company can challenge Indecopi’s final resolution before the Judiciary through judicial review (proceso contencioso-administrativo). But filing the lawsuit does not automatically suspend coercive collection — the collection process keeps running in parallel while the case moves forward. To stop it, a judge has to grant a precautionary measure, and that almost always requires posting a bank guarantee covering the full amount of the fine. In practice, that means challenging the fine and simply not paying at the same time isn’t free — you have to be willing to tie up a guarantee for the full amount while you litigate.

What we didn’t confirm, and why it matters

There’s a common claim that an unpaid Indecopi fine automatically gets reported to credit bureaus like Infocorp/Equifax or the SBS risk registry, the same way an overdue bank debt would. We did not find that rule inside the coercive-collection framework Indecopi uses. It is documented that other agencies, like Sunafil, do report their own fines to credit bureaus — but that’s specific to that agency, not a general rule, and not something we confirmed for Indecopi’s own fines. If you have an official source that establishes this specifically for Indecopi, let us know and we’ll update this page.