Alex Serodio struggles to find enough superlatives to describe Brazil's cumbersome tax system."I think rocket science might be easier," quips the online beauty products retailer in Sao Paulo.
"It's really, really, really, really, really complex," says Serodio, whose company Beleza na Web, or Beauty on the Web, employs a team of accountants and lawyers to navigate the labyrinthine tax rules that are constantly changing.An average of 31 tax rules are introduced or amended every day, according to the Brazilian Institute of Planning and Taxation, making compliance almost impossible for many companies.
It ranked Brazil among the 10 worst countries for paying taxes -- only slightly better than the Congo and Venezuela."I often joke that even when we sleep, we're paying taxes," Gabriel Kanner of Brasil 200, a business lobby group, told local media recently.These consumption taxes, which unfairly hurt the poor and are a nightmare for businesses to calculate, are in the cross-hairs of lawmakers.
"It is a system that is old, onerous, very expensive and complex for companies," says Monica Bendia, a tax specialist at UHY Bendoraytes, an auditing firm in Rio de Janeiro.Several proposals for streamlining the system for taxing goods and services are on the table. "We have a federal district, 26 states and more than 5,500 municipalities and each of them has a tax authority," says Linneu de Albuquerque Mello, a tax lawyer in Rio de Janeiro.
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