A atuação dos grupos de interesse nas discussões sobre a reforma tributária

Abstract

This study analyzed how interest group interventions in the legislative process altered the text of the Brazilian tax reform on consumption, specifically during the processing of Constitutional Amendment Proposals no 45/2019 and no. 110/2019, which culminated in Constitutional Amendment No. 132/2023. The main objective was to understand how specific demands and interests were incorporated into the legislation, based on Collective Action Theory, complemented by Narrative Theory of Collective Action. The research adopted a qualitative and documentary approach. The main documentary corpus consisted of the stenographic notes from the public hearings of the first phase of the reform, held between March and October 2023 in the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate. The material was supplemented by the respective legal provisions, videos of the sessions, reports prepared by legislative committees, and a survey of news related to tax reform. For the interpretation of the data, narrative analysis was used as a methodological strategy, using the Problem–Solution approach, in which the interest groups involved, the intervention strategies employed, and the resolutions resulting from collective action related to the main demands linked to tax accounting that emerged from legislative discussions were identified: Value Added Tax, Selective Tax, tax burden, tax credit utilization, and special taxation regimes. The results showed a representative asymmetry, characterized by the predominance of private interest groups, especially from the business sector, to the detriment of public interest groups. It was also found that the main intervention strategy used was argumentation associated with narratives of crisis in order to legitimize sectoral demands, with private interest groups resorting to narratives of social justice to protect specific benefits, while public interest groups used technical arguments in defense of simplifying the tax system. It was concluded, therefore, that although modernized, the reform reflected pressure from interest groups to insert multiple exceptions into the constitutional text, maintaining the complexity of the system and imposing challenges on society.