Years ago it was mandatory for companies to have two advisors. However, today things have evolved.
The taxpayers or “taxpayers”, as they are kindly called by the authorities of the Public Treasury, make up a heterogeneous universe that goes from wage earners, through informal merchants, to a restless class of citizens called “businessmen” ” Contrary to what is commonly believed, more than 80% of the income of the public estate rests on the latter, which they pay in the form of taxes, fees and special contributions.
Think of a tax burden, whatever it is, and it is certain that an entrepreneur is out there, somewhere, working more than a third of your effective time, trying to generate enough income to be able to pay it. And is that the Treasury does not joke when wanting to collect “what corresponds”.
The employer always keeps in mind that his partnership with the tax administration goes more or less like this: if you start a business and have profits, once you have deducted wages, effort, risks, the development of skills on competition and the sweat of work honest (called “costs and expenses” accounting; well, why not say it, including in the subtraction of profits those derived from the payment of “extra lege taxes” charged by criminal organizations to enter their territories), of the remaining profit (“net income”), the treasury passes us the hat to request its 30% participation.
What does a tax advisor do?
Things get worse when the innocent taxpayer does not have a tax advisor. On this point, we must first answer the simplest of the questions: what does a tax advisor do? It may be worth explaining first what it is not. The tax advisor is not a teacher on how to avoid taxes.
It is not an agent of the “nostra” thing that colludes with “malandrines”, disguised as businessmen to defraud public finances. Despite the bad reputation – good or badly deserved – on the part of the union, a tax advisor develops within the companies a role that goes far beyond seeing how he does to serve his client with the biggest spoon, to the detriment of the collective It would be worth noting that the cartoony vision that makes the businessman look so petty capitalist, like Rico McPato, does not happen to be that: a cartoon that is rarely fulfilled in reality.
On the backs of the thousands of entrepreneurs, small medium and large, who make up the national productive shed, rest the economic functionality of the State, the payment of its capital investments that translate into hospitals, schools, central power generators, airports and ports; as well as supporting your current expenses, such as the payment of a nurse, a doctor, a teacher and a police officer. It would not hurt that when you see a businessman you extend your helping hand and say: “Thank you for everything.”
So the role of the tax advisor is much less obscure than that apocalyptic vision of evading taxes. Typically, our function is much more proactive. The tax advisor, no matter how good, cannot fall asleep on his laurels, we have to be constantly studying the different modifications to the tax laws, which our dear deputies apparently do not like to let rest.
The tax advisor must transfer his knowledge about the multiple legal reforms, in a timely manner, to his clients, in order to avoid that these, imbued as they are in their businesses, do not commit errors of interpretation that can lead to an incorrect application of the legislation in force, which ends up causing worries, which result in applications of fines, complementary taxes and interest.
The idea is not to pay less
And it is that a single fine that we avoid, with an advice provided on time, more than pays, and far above, the fees that we could have billed. On the other hand, a tax advisor who boasts of being one, studies the sentences issued by the Court of Appeals for Internal and Customs Taxes; as well as by the Chamber, Chambers and Courts of Administrative Litigation, which establish “new criteria currents”, which, in turn, set the pattern of taxpayers’ fiscal behavior.
There are cases in which a known and applied criterion on time provides taxpayers with a clear guide on the erroneous application of a tax rule, which can be translated into a tax saved, for being “overpaying” a tax burden due to a bad rule interpreted; or, on the contrary, the need to make a necessary fiscal correction is revealed, by being wrongly applying a rule that can result in an illegitimately lower payment of a tax. In case it is not known, let it be known: tax adjustments can be up or down.
The central idea of a tax advice is not to pay “less” taxes. In innumerable occasions, a tax advisor can advise in the sense that more should be paid. The tax advisor is married to ethics and the correct application of tax rules, and not to the widespread idea that it is used to carry bags of money in a chartered Cessna for the Bahamas. The cost of not having a tax advisor that illustrates the accounting team of a taxpayer (or the taxpayer himself, in case of not having one), can be very high.
I have known many companies that have gone bankrupt because of an incorrect application of tax regulations, which, like a snowball, have generated monumental amounts of complementary taxes, fines and interest; and why not say it, many times, jail sentences, which have been a negative derivative of not having the right vision about that intricate world shaped by tax laws. The temptation of entrepreneurs is to cut costs. Understandable But the next time you decide to save on something, other than dispensing with your tax advisor.