In October, the legal portal Jota held the seminar Tax Litigation: How to value the relationship with good taxpayers and fight persistent debtors. The event, which was sponsored by ETCO, brought together former senator Ana Amélia Lemos; Attorney João Henrique Grognet, General Coordinator of the Credit Recovery Strategy of the Attorney General's Office of the National Treasury (PGFN); the executive director of the Applied Tax Studies Group (Getap), Zabetta Macarini Gorissen; and the tax expert Breno Vasconcelos, a researcher at Insper. The mediation was in charge of Laura Diniz, co-founder of Jota.

Ana Amélia was the author of the Bill of the Senate (PLS) 284/17, which distinguishes between the habitual debtor and other types of debtors and authorizes harsher punishments against him. Some highlights of the debate:

Ana Amélia, who did not run for re-election in 2018, regretted that the new legislature did not continue with the processing of the project to combat the persistent debtor. “We made a very well-constructed proposal, with specialists, with the participation of ETCO, because it involves unfair competition, to separate the types of debtors. Unfortunately, it was shelved.”

Attorney Grognet defended that the country should give more emphasis to the solution of disputes in the administrative sphere, thus reducing the number of cases that go to court. "We must consider tax enforcement as a last tool for the recovery of public credit and strengthen administrative enforcement," he said. Grognet also spoke about the good results obtained from the approval of the Legal Taxpayer Law (No. 13.988/20), which regulated the solution of conflicts through the so-called tax transaction, sanctioned in April 2020.

Zabetta, from Getap, acknowledged that the first results were encouraging, but said he hopes that the mechanism will also be extended to the resolution of disputes involving the so-called tax theses, part of the litigation that arises from divergences between the tax authorities and taxpayers on the correct way to interpret certain laws.

The tax expert Breno Vasconcelos lamented the flawed way in which laws are created and applied in the country, the lack of systematization of the current legislation required by article 212 of the National Tax Code and the excessive duration of tax proceedings.