The Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad, criticized this Tuesday (14) the negative repercussions of the Provisional Measure 1303/2025which taxed income from financial investments and sports betting to compensate for the repeal of the decree that increased the Tax on Financial Operations (IOF). The text needed to be approved by last Wednesday (8) so as not to lose its effectiveness, but was removed from the agenda of the Chamber of Deputies and, as a result, it expired.
“It’s very curious that very conservative sectors of our society mistakenly treat the cut in tax expenditure as a tax increase and not as the end of a privilege. That’s curious. Cutting tax expenditure in Brazil is seen by the press as a whole not as the end of a privilege that was given momentarily, but as a tax increase. There could be no greater mistake than that”, he said.
“Every now and then, I see news like ‘They’re going to tax the bets’. I even have difficulty understanding the phrase. Because all economic activity is taxed. All of it! All of you, all the businesspeople, everyone contributes their fair share to the public budget. Then the onus falls on the public authorities, which want to correct a distortion. Are you going to tax the bets? Yes. Because we all pay taxes. And, when someone escapes, this puts the burden on the whole of society. unburdened from a certain sector”, he stated.
During a public hearing at the Senate Economic Affairs Committee (CAE), Haddad assessed that tax waiver programs “cannot be eternal, except in very specific cases”.
“I’ll give a typical example. The holy houses, which we know are philanthropic entities that do not pay certain taxes, this is in the Constitution. The constituent put it there in the Constitution because they knew the need for the SUS [Sistema Único de Saúde] of the complement of these entities”, he explained, adding, however, that “there is nothing more pernicious than treating this [cobrança de tributos de bets] as a tax increase.”
“That [cobrar das bets] It is not a tax increase. We are protecting society from privileged interest groups that want to make permanent, want to perpetuate what was done in a given situation. This project [MP] has this merit. It is a project that attacks inequality. That’s what he aims for. It begins to correct the inequality produced by the State itself.”
