By Brazil Stock Guide – Brazil’s Finance Ministry has opened a new public window into one of the least transparent parts of the federal budget: tax breaks.
A new interactive panel developed by the Secretariat for Economic Policy shows R$339.86 billion in estimated tax benefits, spread across 87 programs and 86,259 companies, with rankings by tax, program, region, sector and beneficiary.
The tool is based on data from DIRBI, the tax authority’s mandatory declaration of incentives, exemptions, benefits and immunities. It changes the level of visibility around a debate that has often treated tax expenditures as a technical abstraction. The panel allows users to see which programs account for the largest amounts and which companies appear among the biggest estimated beneficiaries.
Moto Honda da Amazônia tops the corporate ranking, with R$8.70 billion in estimated tax breaks. It is followed by Samsung Eletrônica da Amazônia, with R$8.59 billion; JBS, with R$3.75 billion; Yamaha Motor da Amazônia, with R$3.44 billion; Syngenta Proteção de Cultivos, with R$3.41 billion; and LG Electronics do Brasil, with R$3.40 billion.
The list also includes BRF, Bunge Alimentos, Sendas Distribuidora, Vale, Yara Brasil Fertilizantes, TAM Linhas Aéreas, Azul, Seara Alimentos, BASF, Philco, Atacadão and Recofarma. The panel shows not only the company name, but also its economic subcategory, municipality, associated program and estimated tax benefit.
The result is politically sensitive. The public database puts a spotlight on benefits linked to the Manaus Free Trade Zone, agribusiness, food, mining, retail, pharmaceuticals, airlines and programs created in specific crisis periods, such as Perse, the emergency tax relief program originally designed for the events and tourism sectors after the pandemic.
Among the programs, the largest amounts are tied to Fertilizers, with R$30.1 billion, or 8.85% of the total; Meat, with R$29.2 billion, or 8.60%; Sudam/Sudene, the regional development incentives for the North and Northeast, with R$25.1 billion, or 7.38%; Agricultural Pesticides, with R$22.4 billion, or 6.60%; Manaus Free Trade Zone – Industrialized Products for Commercialization, with R$21.7 billion, or 6.38%; Payroll Tax Relief, with R$19.1 billion, or 5.61%; and Perse, with R$17.8 billion, or 5.24%.
The weight of agribusiness stands out. Fertilizers, Meat and Agricultural Pesticides alone add up to about R$81.7 billion, nearly a quarter of the total shown in the panel. Other items linked to agro-industrial chains also appear among the largest programs, including Coffee, General Agricultural Products, Cheese, Seeds and Seedlings, Beans, Rice, Flour and Semolina, Vegetable Oils, Pasteurized or Industrialized Milk, and Soybeans.
By tax, the largest amount of foregone revenue comes from Cofins, a federal social contribution levied on corporate revenue, at R$148.67 billion. It is followed by corporate income tax, with R$48.42 billion; PIS/Pasep, another federal social contribution, with R$35.05 billion; Cofins on imports, with R$32.38 billion; IPI, the federal tax on manufactured goods, with R$27.46 billion; payroll social security contributions, with R$18.64 billion; and CSLL, the social contribution on corporate profits, with R$9.98 billion.
The regional distribution also shows a high degree of concentration. São Paulo accounts for R$115.9 billion, or 34.1% of the total. Amazonas comes second, with R$50.9 billion, or 14.97%, reflecting the importance of the Manaus Free Trade Zone. Paraná follows with R$27.6 billion, ahead of Rio de Janeiro, with R$22.0 billion; Rio Grande do Sul, with R$21.5 billion; and Minas Gerais, with R$20.6 billion.
That concentration gives the panel immediate political relevance. Tax benefits are often presented as tools for regional development or sectoral protection. The picture opened by the Finance Ministry is more complex: a significant share of the foregone revenue is associated with large companies, organized supply chains and sectors with strong lobbying capacity in Brasília.
At the launch event, members of the economic team framed the platform as part of a broader agenda to review tax expenditures. Acting Finance Minister Rogério Ceron said the initiative seeks to create the conditions for a “more serious, technical and transparent debate” about the nature of tax expenditures and “who their beneficiaries are.”
According to Ceron, the panel will allow for “other approaches” and “multidimensional readings” of tax expenditures. By making the information more transparent, he said, the platform could help “build consensus on the need to review” policies that consume a large volume of public resources.
Ceron cited Perse as an example of how disclosing beneficiaries can change the debate. “Society understood who the beneficiaries were,” he said. From there, he added, it became possible to have a public discussion about reviewing a benefit that, in the government’s view, no longer made sense for society.
Débora Freire, the secretary for economic policy, said the panel is another step in an agenda of “better governance” for tax benefits. Brazil performs well in international transparency indicators, she said, but still faces “a major gap in monitoring and governance of tax benefits.”
Freire made an important distinction: the panel is not an impact assessment. “This is not impact here; it is characterization,” she said. The goal, according to her, is to provide a transparent tool showing who the beneficiaries are and offering a socioeconomic reading of the companies and activities reached by tax breaks.
One example used by Freire was payroll tax relief. According to her, the public debate had long assumed that the benefit covered 17 sectors. But when the economic team cross-checked the information, it found a much broader reach. “It was not 17; it was more than 2,000 activities,” she said. The description of the benefit as covering 17 sectors, she added, “did not formally exist.”
For the secretary, the problem is structural. “Most” tax benefits, she said, do not have a managing agency. The Federal Revenue Service administers the benefit, but is not necessarily the manager of the underlying public policy. Many benefits also lack targets that are monitored over time, making evaluation, review and improvement more difficult.
One of the project’s main features is the integration of tax break data with social, productive and environmental indicators. The panel also connects the data to Brazil’s Sustainable Taxonomy, allowing users to infer the potential sectoral alignment of tax benefits with sustainability goals.
The Finance Ministry also wants to use the platform as the basis for a new governance framework for tax benefits. Freire said the Finance Ministry and the Planning Ministry will create an interministerial working group to regulate provisions of Complementary Law 224 and the new Article 14-A of Brazil’s Fiscal Responsibility Law. Those rules call for criteria for approving, renewing and reviewing tax benefits, as well as targets and monitoring.
In practice, the platform does not cut any benefit by itself. But it changes the political terrain. By turning tax breaks into comparable, searchable data that can be linked to programs and companies, the Finance Ministry gains a tool to support future reviews — and the sectors that benefit from those incentives face a level of scrutiny closer to what already applies to direct budget spending.
Federal Revenue Secretary Robson Barreirinhas was more direct in framing the issue as one of fiscal justice. “An absolutely unfair expenditure is one that does not go through the budget,” he said. In his view, tax relief is one of Brazil’s largest sources of fiscal unfairness because it shifts the tax burden onto the rest of the population.
Barreirinhas also said the opacity around tax benefits is not accidental. “There are interests behind this opacity,” he said. Transparency, according to him, was decisive in recent debates over Perse, payroll tax relief, operating subsidies, closed-end funds and taxation of high-income individuals.
The secretary used Perse to illustrate the gap between estimates and amounts effectively declared. According to him, some argued the program cost R$4 billion or R$6 billion a year, while the tax authority believed the figure could reach R$20 billion. With DIRBI, Barreirinhas said, it became clear that R$15 billion in declared benefits had been reached earlier than expected.
“We would not have been able to approve any of this if we had not provided transparency,” Barreirinhas said. In his view, a population that is better informed about the scale of tax benefits is better equipped to demand fiscal justice.
The release of the platform comes as the government tries to improve its fiscal position without relying only on direct tax increases. By shining a light on specific benefits, the Finance Ministry is trying to frame tax breaks as public spending — and therefore as something that should have a purpose, a deadline, an identifiable beneficiary, metrics and evaluation.
That is the central point of the new tool. The panel does more than organize data. It changes the grammar of Brazil’s fiscal debate. The question is no longer only how much the government raises or spends. It is also who pays less, why, in pursuit of which public objective, and at what cost to the rest of society.
Access to the data: Tax Breaks Characterization Panel.