Author: Marcos Cintra

Source: Diário de Marília - Marília / SP - 06/05/2010

In the mid-60s, Minister Roberto Campos was the architect of changes in the country's tax structure. The reform he promoted was decisive for the so-called “economic miracle” of the end of that decade and during the 70s. One of his initiatives was the creation of a value added tax, a measure that represented an innovation for the national productive system of forty years ago.

From the 80s, Roberto Campos began to criticize the Brazilian public administration. It said, "We are still too far from attainable wealth and too close to correctable poverty", and pointed to the tax system as one of the biggest obstacles to be removed by the country. In the debate on the topic, between simplifying reforms and revolutionary innovations, he preferred to keep the latter.

He realized that the value added taxes, VATs, considered as fair and efficient, hid another reality, much less attractive and whose deformations were amplified in countries with federative organization. The result is bureaucratic exacerbation, rampant corruption, exasperating complexity, prohibitive collection costs, irresistible evasion and inviting tax evasion.

Since then, Roberto Campos has become a guerrilla for tax reform and taxes on financial transactions. He was an ardent supporter of electronic tax, single tax and non-declaratory taxes. Such a stance may surprise those who claim that he was a hardened conservative. They're wrong. He was always original, a creator of paradigms.

On 3/11/1991, in an article in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, entitled "Reforma ou revoluo", Roberto Campos stated that Brazilian fiscal ethics had been destroyed. He said that paying taxes in Brazil is buying upset and that only organized companies and formally paid employees paid direct taxes. The other two-thirds, who evaded it, were classified by him as delinquents.

He went on to say in that article that the replacement of paper money by electronic money and computerization in banks were the country's chance to adopt the single tax. He concluded by stating: “In my opinion, the characteristics of a fiscal revolution would be: 1) a generating event sufficiently broad and simple to eliminate the border between taxpayers and criminals; 2) rates low enough to make the engineering of tax evasion ridiculous; 3) automated collection to render the three tax authorities' bureaucracies dispensable; and 4) instantaneous transfer to beneficiaries, avoiding the complications of indexing taxes. All of these conditions are satisfied by Professor Marcos Cintra's proposal and none of the reformist proposals ”.

Had he been alive, Roberto Campos would have turned 93 in the last month of April. The late minister, senator and federal deputy was one of the most brilliant public figures in Brazil's political and economic history and his legacy must be rescued at a time when the country is preparing to debate the most important of structural reforms from 2011, which it is the one that can institute a new tax model so that the country can re-register a new “economic miracle”.

Marcos Cintra