The government is trying to vote this Tuesday in the Chamber of Deputies on the bill which punishes the so-called persistent debtor. The rapporteur of the project, MP Antonio Carlos Rodrigues (PL-SP), decided not to modify the text approved in the Senate, and if the text is approved in this way, it will go directly to the sanction of President Lula.
The leader of the government in the House, José Guimarães (PT-CE), confirmed that there was an agreement to submit the bill to a vote, after agreement between the political articulation and the Ministry of Finance.
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The project is treated as a priority by the government and seen as a way to fight crime. Since last week, the directive given to base leaders was to keep the text as it came from the Senate to avoid the proposal having to return to the other House, which would delay the implementation of the new rules.
The draft establishes objective criteria for identifying persistent debtors, defined as taxpayers with “substantial, repeated and unjustified” payment defaults. Among the measures envisaged are the ban on participating in calls for tenders, the ban on benefiting from tax advantages and the ban on accessing or pursuing legal recovery. The government argues that the mechanism targets business structures organized for tax avoidance, not companies in financial difficulty.
The proposal also creates cooperative compliance instruments, such as the Confia and Sintonia programs, which enable self-regulation, risk classification and the granting of benefits to taxpayers with a good record, including tax compliance bonuses. Treasury says this combination reduces litigation and improves predictability for businesses and federal revenues.
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Rank-and-file leaders say there is an “enabling environment” to approve the proposal this week. If the text is adopted without modification, it goes directly to presidential sanction.
The text was supported by commercial entities. In a statement, organizations such as Abegás, Fiesp, ANTF, IbP, Sindicom, UNICA, ABRASCA, ABTP and Instituto Combustível Legal (ICL) claim that the project consolidates modern tax compliance programs.
“The maintenance of the current regulatory vacuum and the fragmentation of the rules in this area benefit precisely those agents who operate outside the law, many of whom are associated with organized criminal structures which use tax default as a source of financing and distortion of competition”, indicates an extract.
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