Originally published in the July 2 edition of World Tax Daily (Copyrights Tax Analysts – www.taxanalysts.com)
Brazil’s Federal Revenue Department (FRD) on June 26 signed an agreement with Brazil’s National Council of Justice (CNJ), allowing magistrates to have access to the FRD’s database. The agreement was signed by FRD Chief Commissioner Jorge Rachid and the CNJ president, Justice Ellen Gracie, who is also president of the Supreme Court.
The agreement provides that judges from all over the country have access to Federal Revenue Department’s database through an electronic system (InfoJud), including information protected by fiscal secrecy, taxpayers’ identity, location, assets, income tax, and rural property tax returns. The access will be online and will replace the existing paper requests that judges are currently required to use when trying to locate taxpayers’ assets. It will also expedite the entire information request procedure by shortening it from an average of three weeks to just 30 seconds.
Justice Gracie explained that the new system will enable more protection of taxpayers’ information because only the magistrate handling a case against a given taxpayer will have access to the necessary information. Under the existing request process, based on paper, many public servants are involved in the process and have access to taxpayers’ fiscal information, which may lead to misuse of such information, sometimes for illegal purposes. The new system will enable more restricted access to taxpayers’ tax information.
Rachid said that the new system will also allow the FRD to relocate hundreds of FRD employees currently used to provide tax information to the CNJ. In the state of São Paulo alone, Rachid expects that close to 100 FRD employees will be relocated to other tax activities, including field audits.
David Roberto R. Soares da Silva