Former Revenue Secretary Marcos Cintra, who this week organized two meetings to discuss taxation on financial transactions, says that the scope of the conversation will change in relation to what his defenders proposed when the tax reform debate heated up in 2019, still under the his management in the agency.
“In the previous debate, there was only talk of CPMF, but now we are working on financial transactions 4.0, which goes beyond the CPMF”, says Cintra, who even left the post as a result of the unpopularity of the tax at the time.
The former secretary says that the debate evolved based on studies developed in the United States to expand the tax base, targeting what he calls the excessive financialization of the world.
“Our CPMF only applied to bank debits, when you buy or sell something. It was the so-called check tax. But today, 4.0 also takes financial transactions that are exploding and creating instability. It takes derivatives, financial transactions, takes operations structured and takes, above all, those thousands of operations that are performed at high frequency by computers, with incredible speed, a distortion. One way to combat this is to tax, and the advantage is that this helps to give progress”, he says.
Cintra argues that the measure would expand the tax base to the point of allowing a much lower rate than what was thought in 2019, around 1.5%. According to him, it is possible to bring it down to a tenth of 1%.
“The CPMF or taxation on financial transactions in Brazil has a rate of 0.38%, 0.40%. And if there is a single tax, it would be around 1% or 1.2%, a high rate, because the CPMF was a tax on financial transactions 1.0. The micro-tax, which is what we are discussing, is 4.0. It is an evolution”, he says.
For Cintra, this week’s meeting showed that it has the potential to heat up the proposal, as it brought together representatives from three parliamentary fronts, entrepreneurship, payroll tax relief and services.
“For the first time, there was a serious discussion. For the first time, no one arrived in the room saying that it is the return of the CPMF”, he says.
Cintra is also a consultant for the Indigo Foundation, linked to União Brasil, which should include the proposal in the government program for Luciano Bivar’s presidential candidacy.
Joana Cunha with andressa Motter and Paulo Ricardo Martins
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