Auditoria fiscal como determinante do comportamento de conformidade tributária: um estudo de caso com contribuintes corporativos no Brasil

Abstract

In 1968, Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker theorized the economics of crime, stating that the potential offender always weighs the cost-benefit before committing the offense. For that, he considers the size of the reward provided by the crime, in case of success, and the probability of to be punished and the severity of the penalty, if detected. Since then, many studies on tax compliance have emerged, extending the original model in several directions. The present applied and exploratory research intended, through a case study, to evaluate the impacts of tax audits and their consequences on the behavior of Brazilian corporate taxpayers. This investigation sought to compare the evolution of taxpayers' aggressiveness after being submitted to an audit, with reports in the international literature pointing in two main directions. One approach states that the audited company positively changes its behavior, acting more ethically after inspection by understand that your evasive action has been detected. On the other hand, it has also been stated that these taxpayers may present an even more refractory behavior to taxation after the State's action, mainly motivated by a mistaken view of the use of randomness in the selection of cases to be inspected. Unlike most international studies, which use a methodology centered on the comparison between the tax burden borne and corporate profit to identify the degree of individual aggressiveness, the present study shifted the denominator of this equation to revenue, considering that this variable is much more appropriate to the Brazilian case. Here, more than 44% of the tax burden comes from production and consumption, different from the pattern observed in the European Community and the United States, where taxation of wealth and income is much more representative. The empirical findings of the current investigation confirm most of the recent studies, where inspected taxpayers show an increase in aggressiveness after the fiscal action. In addition, this effect was enhanced when the study focused on taxpayers who work in environments heavily contaminated by tax evasion, that tend to respond even more negatively to an audit. The conclusions of this investigation are very significant for the Brazilian Tax Administration, as it demonstrates the need to modify the use of risk management mechanisms to increase the feeling of fiscal presence, and the consequent perception of risk of detection by taxpayers.