Senate committee approves “mini tax reform” bill

The tax system requires that companies not only collect taxes – considered main obligations – but also issue invoices and declarations, the so-called accessory tax obligations. For example: a taxpayer providing some type of service must pay the ISS to the municipality, according to the law, but also issue the invoice that generates that obligation.

The problem is that, today, there are more than a thousand service invoice formats and nine different types of electronic documents, according to Senator Alan Rick, which makes it difficult for companies to comply with ancillary tax obligations.

For the parliamentarian, the approval of the PLP “paves the way for tax reform”, simplifies the lives of taxpayers and also of inspection. “It is a breakthrough for Brazil, it drastically reduces bureaucracy, simplifies the system, unifies the database of federal, state and municipal farms. It greatly improves the lives of those who undertake and who collect taxes.”

Changes

The bill institutes the National Statute for the Simplification of Accessory Tax Obligations. Among the changes is the creation of the Brasil Eletrônica Nota Fiscal (NFB-e), which will be valid for the sale of products and the provision of services throughout the country.

According to Dylliard Alessi, a tax lawyer at Peccinin Advocacia, the lack of standardization of invoices harms taxpayers who sell goods or provide services in more than one location. “There is no integration, a form of centralization of models for tax information. This complicates a lot for companies, especially for those that operate in more than one federative unit.”

Therefore, simplification will be more than positive in the specialist’s evaluation. “Any simplification and the issuance of a model invoice for all of Brazil will certainly reduce these costs, because companies and their accountants will be able to adopt a single way of doing things and this will encourage these operations to become increasingly easier. ”

The Digital Tax Declaration (DFD) is also a novelty brought by the text. The document will gather information on federal, state, district and municipal taxes based on the unification of the databases of the Federal Treasury and other federated entities.

The tax lawyer says that, depending on the regulations following the bill, the DFD may unify documents, such as declarations of Socioeconomic and Tax Information (Defis), Income Tax Withheld at Source (Dirf) and Federal Tax Debts ( DCTF), among others.

“All these ancillary obligations are a huge number of documents that may, in the future, be condensed into just one document, which will gather information on all taxes: federal, state, district and municipal. This is a very smart idea, because it reduces bureaucracy and, mainly, the costs for companies, which makes the prices of products and services more competitive.

With this, it is expected that the time that Brazilian companies spend to fulfill these ancillary obligations will be reduced, as well as the costs. Brazil has one of the most complex tax systems in the world. Here, taxpayers spend, on average, between 1,483 and 1,501 hours a year to prepare, declare and pay taxes, according to a World Bank report.

The changes will be conducted by the National Committee for the Simplification of Accessory Tax Obligations, the CNSOA, which will be created up to 90 days after the PLP is approved – if it is. The committee will have 24 members and, contrary to what was foreseen in the first version of the text, it will have the participation of the productive sector.

There will be six representatives from the Special Secretariat of the Federal Revenue, six from the states and the Federal District, six from the municipalities and six from civil society.

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