The public hearing marked the launching of the National Week on Fiscal Justice, promoted by the National Union of the Revenue’s Attorneys-in-Fact

The National Revenue attorney-general, Luiz Inacio Lucena Adams, announced on Tuesday, in a public hearing at the Committee on Finance and Taxation, which the government should soon send to Congress bills to encourage those intending to pay off fiscal debts. On the other hand, the bills will harden rules for bad payers, since they will render tax foreclosure more effective.

Objectives
According to the president of the union, João Carlos Souto, their objective is to start reasoning on the tax system, seeking fiscal justice.

For Adams, fiscal justice should also be reached through the relationship between the collection bodies and the taxpayer, which should be amended by the bills from the Executive. According to him, it is necessary to streamline procedures and to reduce bureaucracy, both to make the life of those who want to fulfill their duties easier and to collect from those who do not want to pay.

Half of the National Gross Product
The National Revenue Attorney-General declared that Brazil has an outstanding debt of R$650 billion. If the pending administrative processes are taken into account, Brazilian State should receive R$1.4 trillion, half of the NGP.

Lucena also informed that Brazil had currently 67,000,000 undergoing processes; 40% of them consist of tax foreclosures, or be it, the effort by the State to collect tax debts. “Tax administration has to open itself to society and understand its complex realities, but also needs to have the ability to effectively collect the duly constituted credits”, he stressed.

Harmed Competition
Professor André Franco Montoro Filho, of the Brazilian Institute on Competition Ethics, evaluated that a good business environment is destructed by tax dodging, by smuggling and by other practices performed by those who do not want to pay taxes. According to him, that fact generates an imbalance in competition, which is fed by the slowness of the collection processes – which even get to last 20 years.

Montoro Filho said that this eliminates from the market the good undertakers and attracts those who earn money because of deficiencies in law. He reminded that the loss in collection, caused by those problems, decreases the government’s ability of making social investments.

Inequality
The attorney João Carlos Souto explained that fiscal justice defends a streamlining and a change in the way of collecting taxes. According to him, the greatest injustice of the current system is the fact that great part of the tax burden falls upon consumption, and is paid indistinctly by rich and poor.

He stressed that the injustice is increased because poor people spend most of their salaries with subsistence, while the rich save or invest. According to the perspective of decreasing tax load for the poor, Souto defended the tax release on the basic basket of food.

The vice-president of the Federal Council of the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB), Vladimir Rossi Lourenço, said that Brazil collects taxes on consume, but does not do it adequately on the income and wealth. Therefore, he affirmed, a tax reform would only be justified if it reduced the load on consume.

Report - Vania Alves
Editing - João Pitella Junior/Rejane Xavier
Translation - Positive Idiomas Ltda