A regulation may implement licensing reform, but it cannot quietly amend it.
As I noted last August, Acts 3-2025, 96-2025, and 102-2025 form one of Puerto Rico’s most consequential economic liberty victories in recent memory. Act 3-2025 ends automatic exclusion for people with past convictions. Act 102-2025 opens the door to qualified professionals licensed elsewhere in the United States. And, as particularly relevant here, Act 96-2025 imposes a strict 30-day clock, so opportunity is not lost to administrative delay.
The premise should be straightforward: regulation should protect consumers, not entrench monopolies or exclude the deserving.
But every reform has a second life, also known as implementation. The first belongs to the Legislature. The second belongs to the Department of State, the licensing boards, and the quiet discretion of those who will either honor the statutes or domesticate them.
That second life is now at a decisive stage. The State Department has published a regulation to implement Act 102-2025. As of public reporting on May 27, the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico had not yet received it for its required review, creating a vital window to get implementation right before the Oversight Board acts and before the regulation’s procedures become entrenched in practice.
First things first: The proposed regulation is not an enemy of reform. In some ways, it correctly recognizes that inconsistent licensing rules limit access to work, depress wages and restrict mobility. It also endorses portability, transparency, cooperation, proportionality, and the elimination of duplicative requirements. And those principles are the architecture of reform.
But a regulation is judged by its machinery, not only its preamble. And here the machinery raises serious concerns. My main concern: will Puerto Rico’s 30-day clock be real? Or will the clock start only when the bureaucracy decides the clock may start?
It bears emphasizing that the regulation gets important things right. It directs boards to avoid duplicative requirements already satisfied elsewhere unless they are indispensable to protect the public interest. It permits limited Puerto Rico-specific evaluations, including local laws, ethics, disciplinary standards, and jurisdiction-specific practice, while cautioning against recreating the full licensing gauntlet. It requires annual publication of key data by each board: applications, approvals, denials, average decision times, provisional licenses, denial grounds, and reconsideration outcomes. These are strong provisions.
The trouble begins with timing, however.
Act 96-2025 establishes a strict 30+30 statutory sequence. Covered boards must review, approve, or deny a certified, sworn application within 30 days of filing. If the board issues no timely determination, a provisional license issues automatically while review continues. If the additional 30-day period expires without approval, denial, or a valid request for additional information, the requested license must issue. There is no intermediate pre-clock step the Legislature left for regulators to insert.
Act 102-2025 imposes a parallel obligation. Boards must communicate determinations within 30 days of filing. For applicants holding government certifications from another jurisdiction, the mandate is even more explicit: the local board must issue a provisional license immediately, with the filing of the application— ”expedirá inmediatamente, con la radicación de la solicitud, una licencia provisional”—while any remaining Puerto Rico-specific requirements are completed in parallel.
Yet Article 20 of the Regulation creates a “documentary pre-evaluation” period of up to 60 days, extendable by 30 more in exceptional cases, before the statutory clock even begins. Only after the board certifies the file complete does the 30-day period start. An applicant could wait 60 to 90 days before the clock the Legislature created begins to tick.
To be fair, a basic completeness check is legitimate. But it must be short, objective, and ministerial. The regulation itself describes pre-evaluation as a formal documentary review, not a merits adjudication. Identity verification, checklist review, license-status confirmation, and a single deficiency notice are intake functions. Thus, a five-to-ten-business-day limit better reflects the limited nature of the task and the statute’s evident impatience with delay. If documents are genuinely missing, the board can issue one timely deficiency notice and toll the clock while the applicant cures.
When, as here, a regulation adds a multi-month precondition that the statute does not contain, it does not merely implement the law; it potentially rewrites the trigger the Legislature chose. And that is not a drafting quibble. It is the line between implementation and revision: the Legislature selected filing as the moment the clock begins, yet the regulation appears to substitute board-certified completeness after pre-evaluation. For anyone who believes administrative agencies must execute law rather than quietly remake it, that should be anathema.
That is where the timing problem becomes a delegation problem. To the extent the regulation moves the statutory starting line from “upon filing” to “after pre-evaluation is complete,” it exceeds the delegation. Act 102 grants rulemaking authority to carry out universal recognition. But it does not authorize regulators to relocate the very trigger the Legislature chose. Indeed, the Legislature delegated the power to open the door; it never delegated the power to move the doorway.
The same logic applies to Article 13: “immediately” cannot mean “after 90 days.” The statute commands immediate provisional issuance upon filing for government certifications. The Regulation imposes a 90-day pre-evaluation, extendable by 30 more days, before the application is even considered validly filed. Labels cannot defeat substance. A definition that converts “inmediatamente, con la radicación” into a 90-to-120-day process inverts the statute.
The timing problem is the central issue, but consumer protection must not become the new password for delay elsewhere in the regulation. Insurance mandates and pending-complaint rules can impose parallel barriers if applied mechanically: sweeping coverage requirements function as a second licensing gauntlet for solo practitioners, and treating unresolved allegations as denial grounds conflates investigation with adjudication. Both warrant attention.
Luckily, the regulation itself supplies the solution. Article 38 correctly provides that Act 102 prevails over any contrary regulatory provision. And where, as here, the language can be read two ways—one that makes the 30-day clock real and one that permits prolonged pre-evaluation—the faithful reading is the first. In the recent landmark decision in Vázquez y Torres v. Consejo de Titulares del Condominio Los Corales (DACO), 2025 TSPR 56, the Puerto Rico Supreme Court dismantled the local version of Chevron deference. Citing Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the court held that “la interpretación de la ley es una tarea que corresponde inherentemente a los tribunales” and that agency conclusions of law must be reviewed “en todos sus aspectos,” guided not by “deferencia automática” but by the judiciary’s own interpretive tools. The days of judges abdicating their role to administrative say-so are over.
The remedy is not complicated. If the Puerto Rico State Department wants this regulation to honor the statute rather than domesticate it, the changes laid out below would do most of the work.
The necessary revisions fall into three categories. First, the clock must start when the Legislature said it starts: upon filing. Documentary pre-evaluation should be limited to five to ten business days and confined to ministerial intake: identity verification, checklist review, license-status confirmation, and one specific deficiency notice. If documents are genuinely missing, the clock may be tolled while the applicant cures. But a board should not be allowed to create a 60-to-90-day waiting room before the statutory waiting period begins.
Second, provisional licensing must mean what the statute says it means. Article 13 should be revised so provisional licenses based on out-of-jurisdiction government certifications issue promptly upon filing, after threshold verification, while Puerto Rico-specific requirements proceed in parallel. Likewise, Article 21 should expressly incorporate Act 96’s full 30+30 sequence: if the additional thirty-day period expires without action or a valid request for information, the license must issue.
Finally, consumer protection should be tailored rather than weaponized. Insurance requirements should be risk-based, occupation-specific, and presumptively satisfied by employer or equivalent coverage. Pending complaints should justify temporary conditions or pauses where appropriate, not automatic denial based on unresolved allegations.
These changes weaken no consumer protection. More to the point, they make the reform lawful, measurable, and, more importantly, resistant to administrative drift.
This fight, in short, is over whether law can discipline bureaucracy. In Puerto Rico, delay has too often functioned as policy: quietly, politely, and at great human cost.
A license delayed is a job denied. A credential delayed is a family budget strained, a hospital shift unfilled, a construction project slowed, a professional discouraged from returning home. Acts 3, 96, and 102 broke those chains. The regulation, and the Oversight Board’s review, must now honor that choice. Opportunity, after all, should not be hostage to needless bureaucracy.
Nor should implementation replace this chain-breaking law with a velvet rope.
This article was written originally under the Substack name The Bauermeister Brief! Feel free to subscribe for free to receive new posts and support his work.
