Congress awaits a new text on the persistent debtor, but the government insists on the project

Brasilia – O Congress expects the government to present this week an alternative to the bill creating a register of so-called “debt debtors”, the report said. Station/Broadcast. While being available to discuss the proposal, the economic team prefers to insist on the text already sent.

The project is stopped Room, among other things, due to pressure from companies that use default as a business strategy and do not want to be part of the list of entrepreneurs with dirty names. Last week, MP Ricardo Ayres (Republicanos-TO), who reports the text, decided to leave out the “debtor in default” section and to focus only on the benefits for good payers, also part of the project.

OR Station/Broadcast has already shown that there is a dispute involving the government and, for example, a part of the fuel sector, which would be the most affected, and claims that the Treasury text could unfairly affect distributors, which the economic team denies.

Even the “republican” companies have asked that the text be implemented in a complementary bill – and not in an ordinary bill, since it is being developed in the House. “An approach through ordinary legislation will not fully and uniformly cover all aspects relating to persistent debtors, leaving gaps that would undermine the effectiveness of the rule, making it difficult to crack down on tax evasion,” said the Brazilian Institute of Oil and Gas, in a note released last week. The IBP defends the approval of another project along the same lines, being developed in the Senate and signed by the current president of the IBP. Petrobras, Jean Paul Prates.

Despite this movement, the economic team believes that the issue is a common law issue, as it is an issue with criminal consequences. The thesis is that the proposal covers tax crimes that are already considered crimes, limiting itself to delimiting the figure of the debtor. Furthermore, there is no government jurisdiction to classify a tax crime: the rule would apply to any tax authority. According to Broadcast, sources from the economic group believe that moving the issue into a complementary law would only create difficulties for the approval of the text.

Another point is that the criteria of complementary law are subjective. If the IRS were to prove that a businessman acted in bad faith by opening a company to defraud the IRS and only then were free to include him in the list of persistent debtors, the estimate is that the fraud could last ten to twenty years. court, considering the entire process up to the final sentence.

The text under discussion defines the criteria to define who qualifies as persistent debtors: companies with irregular debts exceeding R$ 15 million, the value of which exceeds the company’s assets, or with partners involved in cases of opening and closing of companies in the last five years. Updated revenue data shows that around 1,100 companies, or 0.005% of the 20 million corporate taxpayers, meet these criteria and have a total debt of R$240 billion to the tax authorities.