Today let’s talk a bit about income taxes in Brazil. First, let me tell you that we have two official “persons” in Brazil: pessoa física and pessoa jurídica. The pessoa física is the average Joe, like myself. Each pessoa física has a CPF, cadastro de pessoa física, which is an official national number, like a social security number in the US. If you have a company, then you have a pessoa jurídica. Each pessoa jurídica has a CNPJ, the official national company number.

Brazilians who earned more than R$ R$ 22.487,25 connected to their CPF have to “declare” their income (declarar o imposto de renda) to the government. Each money transaction connected to your CPF is monitored by the government, like bank deposits, rent, etc. So any kind of money that goes into your bank account is monitored by the government and if you don’t declare that amount, that’s tax evasion (sonegação de impostos).

You have a fixed percentage of deductibles like health insurance and education and if your savings account has more than R$50.000,00 you have to declare it too. In your “income tax declaration” you need to state if you have a car, a house, if you sold a car, bought a car, a house, any money transaction has to be there. If the government finds that you left something out you might “cair na malha fina”, which is when the government summons you to explain the inconsistencies in your declaration.

There is a time period of two months to declare your income tax, from March 1st till April 29th, and this year it will only be done online, you can’t hand in a printed copy of it. You can download a software from the government site, do it yourself and send it online or you can save the file in a CD and drop it off at an accredited bank agency. You can always go to your accountant for clarification on how to do your declaration. If your declarion is not submitted by April 29th you will pay a fine of more than R$160,00.

Depending on the amount of tax that you pay, you can be restituído (given back) a percentage of what you paid later in the year. This is called restituição.

If you want to learn more about how Brazilians pay their taxes, go to the Economia UOL site  and learn more about it.

This is it for today! Have a great week!