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

Starting point: the fine has to become final first

Before talking about forced collection, one thing has to be clear: OSIPTEL cannot seize a company’s assets over a fine that is still being contested through the administrative appeal process. A sanctioning resolution becomes final either when the company fails to appeal within its deadline, or when OSIPTEL’s Appeals Tribunal (Tribunal de Apelaciones) rules on the appeal and upholds the sanction. Only then does the debt become enforceable and eligible to move into coercive collection.

Does OSIPTEL run its own collection process, or fall back on the general law?

This is the first question worth answering, since it isn’t the same for every public agency. In OSIPTEL’s case, its own sanctions regulation — the General Regulation on Infractions and Sanctions (RGIS) — expressly points to the coercive-collection procedure to enforce payment: “fines may be collected in accordance with the coercive collection procedure.” That general procedure is set out in Law No. 26979, the Coercive Execution Procedure Law, whose Article 1 states it “establishes the legal framework for coercive execution acts corresponding to all entities of the Public Administration.” In other words, like Sunafil, OSIPTEL does not invent its own standalone collection process — it applies the same general framework that governs the rest of the Peruvian state, through a coercive-collection executor (ejecutor coactivo) designated inside the agency itself.

How forced collection begins

Once a fine is final, if the company still hasn’t paid, OSIPTEL issues a Coercive Execution Resolution. This is served on the debtor and contains a payment order. Under Article 14 of Law No. 26979, the obligated party has seven (7) business days from notification to comply; if it doesn’t pay within that window, the coercive-collection executor is authorized to order forced-collection measures. That 7-business-day window is the most concrete, verified figure available on “how long a company has to pay” before actual seizure measures can begin.

The 2026 change: a lawsuit no longer freezes collection

Here is the most significant, OSIPTEL-specific wrinkle, and it’s a recent one: Legislative Decree No. 1718, published on February 7, 2026, added Article 35-A to Law No. 27336 (OSIPTEL’s own powers-and-functions law). According to specialized sources that reproduce its text and agree on the substance — a law firm (Garrigues) and business/legal press (Gestión, Infobae) — this rule establishes that suspending coercive collection no longer happens simply because a company files a lawsuit against the sanction. Previously, telecom operators often used that route to postpone payment while litigation dragged on, sometimes for years. We could not confirm the exact wording directly on El Peruano’s official portal (direct access attempts failed), so this point is kept as reported information, though it is well corroborated by multiple independent sources that agree with each other.

The only way to pause collection: a bank guarantee

According to those same sources, to get coercive execution suspended while the lawsuit is pending, the company must give OSIPTEL a bank guarantee (carta fianza) meeting several conditions: it must be issued by a top-tier bank supervised by Peru’s banking regulator (SBS); be irrevocable, joint and several, unconditional, and immediately executable at OSIPTEL’s sole request; cover the full amount subject to coercive collection; and remain valid for at least one year, renewable within the 15 business days before it expires, for as long as the lawsuit is ongoing. If the company wins the case, the guarantee is never executed; if OSIPTEL wins, the bank must pay immediately. If the company does not post the guarantee, it is required to pay the fine right away, regardless of the pending lawsuit.

What the coercive-collection executor can seize

If the company neither pays nor posts a guarantee, the coercive-collection executor has the seizure measures listed in Article 33 of Law No. 26979 at its disposal: intervention (over the company’s revenue collection, information, or asset administration), deposit or conservatory attachment of assets, registration of the measure in Public Registries for registrable property, and garnishment over bank accounts, deposits, securities and other funds held by the company. In practice, for a telecom operator, garnishing bank accounts tends to be the fastest and most disruptive measure to execute.

Is there a way to pay in installments?

This is one of the most common questions, and based on the available information there’s no clear answer in the company’s favor. Unlike tax debts owed to Sunat, which have a fairly well-known installment (fraccionamiento) regime, we found no express right in OSIPTEL’s RGIS, in Law No. 27336, or in Law No. 26979 (as applied to non-tax administrative fines) allowing a company to request installment payment of an OSIPTEL fine. In practice, ad hoc arrangements may occasionally be negotiated, but there is no verified public evidence of a formal, regulated procedure for that, so this remains a genuine information gap rather than a definitive “no.”

What couldn’t be confirmed

Two questions were left without a verified answer, and it’s worth saying so plainly rather than guessing. First, we found no evidence that OSIPTEL reports a company’s unpaid fines to credit bureaus (as sometimes happens with other kinds of debt). Second, we found no rule directly tying mere non-payment of a fine to automatic loss of an operator’s concession or license; that would, in any case, be a matter governed by the Telecommunications Law and it did not surface confirmed in the sources reviewed for this article. Both points are left out of the main body for lack of support — not because they were ruled out.

Bottom line

OSIPTEL doesn’t run a forced-collection process wholly different from the rest of the Peruvian state: it uses Law No. 26979 like everyone else, with its own coercive-collection executor, a 7-business-day deadline, and the same four seizure types. What is genuinely OSIPTEL-specific — and very recent — is the bank-guarantee requirement for a lawsuit to actually pause collection, a rule aimed squarely at stopping large operators from using litigation as a strategy to delay payment of multi-million-sol fines.

Is your complaint about a missed portability deadline?

If your complaint is that your carrier missed the number portability deadline, first check number portability: deadlines and what can go wrong to understand the process before it reaches this collection stage.