The “via crucis” of the fiscal credit refunds

 

It is not enough to produce, buy, sell, create brand, search for new markets, conquer customers, pay taxes.... nothing of these are sufficient for the Brazilian entrepreneur to maintain updated his activities, generate employment, work and revenue. Unfortunately, in our country, the businessman - in addition to the basic exercise of his activity - has to run after his own legitimate rights assured by laws, decrees, administrative rules, resolutions, regulations, well, this tangle of regulations that, when against the entrepreneur, works perfectly well. The effect of any infraction to these rules is enough to know the immediate efficiency and sovereign power of the Brazilian State . Unfortunately, the reciprocity is not true. The businessman that legitimately accumulates fiscal credits, in spite of all the legislation created in its favor, is submitted to all types of constraint and humiliation, as if his right should be submitted to the prior examination of the greedy and slow and bureaucracy which is uncommitted with the needs of the country.

This is the case mentioned in the printed press covering two companies Curtume Touro Ltda and Vitapelli Ltda., which employ thousand of individual and that, humbly, request the Secretaria da Receita Federal (Internal Revenue Service) to release what is of their right – fiscal credits resulting from export activities – which release has been postponed to the limit. These fiscal credits are legitimate rights and it is the State responsibility to refund them in cash, but what has been noticed in the occurrence of a practice that is unconceivable in our days, hindering the financial health of these companies and of the thousands of employments that they generate. In addition to the loss resulting from the non-refund, the companies are twice as much penalized, because when accounting the credits are rights to receive, they account results on which income tax is applied, even without the refund of the fiscal credits. This means, they pay income tax on an expectation of result.

These refunds, when they are practiced, occur in terms incompatible with the entrepreneurial dynamics. These cases were published by the press, as since 2002 the companies mentioned above are struggling to receive, even without interests and monetary correction – what it is of their ownership by right. The Federal Government owes them as related to the non-effected refunds of IPI, PIS and COFINS, approximately R$ 9.2 millions to Curtume Touro Ltda. and R$ 100,7 millions to Vitapelli Ltda.

The slowness in the refund puts at risks the 3.400 employments generated by the two companies, is corrosive to the working capital of these organizations, as well as it constitutes a permanent threat to the act of doing business. Maybe this – closing of companies and unemployment – is what the technicians responsible for this almost bad debt wish. Up to when the businessman will have to tolerate this type of procedure?

 

Revista Courobusiness – Ed. Nº 53 – julho/agosto de 2007