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SpaccaOn the 13th, 14th and 15th, the XIV National Congress of Tax Studies, organized by the Brazilian Institute of Tax Studies (Ibet), will take place in São Paulo, at the Hotel Renaissance. . This year, I had the honor of being invited by professor Paulo de Barros Carvalho to participate in the panel on “Taxation in new technologies”, in which I will discuss the topic “Beps and International Electronic Taxation” (on the 14th, from 10am to 12pm).
The accelerated evolution of the so-called “digital economy” has made taxation rules originally designed exclusively for environments in which physical establishments carry out operations through which tangible goods physically move from one corner to another, uncertain and often difficult to apply.
With multiple possibilities, operations carried out in a virtual environment, especially in the context of the internet, allow companies, or even individuals, to provide goods and services to customers located in the most diverse jurisdictions, without the need to establish any physical presence in these locations.
Cloud computing , e-commerce , online B2B Lead games and streaming , among many others, are examples of activities carried out on the internet, which, over the last few years, have generated billions of dollars, to the point where the five most valuable companies in the world (Google , Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft) all belong to the sector. These companies collectively generated more than US$25 billion in net profit in the first half of 2017 alone. This circumstance led the prestigious publication The Economist to state that these activities are the “oil” of the digital era [1] , in an allusion to the commodity that played a predominant role in the global economy throughout the 20th century.
In Brazil, the growth of the internet was equally dizzying. It is estimated that, in 2014, more than half of the Brazilian population already had access to the internet [2] . Online retail commerce ( e-commerce ) showed real growth of 290.4% in the period between 2007 and 2014 [3] .
Due to this notable performance, operations carried out in a virtual environment, in Brazil and around the world, caught the attention of tax authorities, as, in addition to being immensely profitable and, therefore, demonstrating high contributory capacity, these activities, due to their intangibility, expanded significantly increase the possibilities for carrying out aggressive tax planning. And, these plans resulted in low or no taxation of the positive results generated by these large projects.
As a consequence, in recent years, large conglomerates, such as the aforementioned Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, among many others, have had to face tax disputes arising from assessments issued by jurisdictions that were dissatisfied with the amount of taxes imposed on them. they were collected, disproportionate, in their opinion, to the wealth that circulated in their territories.
In their allegations, the tax authorities stated that, through the exploitation of regulatory gaps, multinational groups were able to substantially reduce the taxation levied on their activities, either through the misuse of the concept of “non-resident” in different jurisdictions, or through fragmentation of activities with the aim of avoiding the characterization of a permanent establishment, or even by carrying out intercompany operations , which, due to the mismatches in the applicable tax treatment , allowed the artificial transfer of profits to jurisdictions with low or no taxation.
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發表於 13:30:34