Word: braziller
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...more grumbling among business men and politicians than the decision to make more Brazilians cough up more cruzeiros by tightening the income tax laws. The man who got the job in 1964 was Tax Chief Orlando Travancas, 48, who did it so well that he soon became known in Brazil as "Travancas the Terrible." He doubled the number of taxpayers (to 3,000,000), raised revenues from $135 million a year to $960 million, and forced Brazilians for the first time to take their taxes seriously. Last week Travancas got repaid with interest for his efforts. As part...
Travancas' fault was simply that he had been too successful. Before he took over Brazil's tax rolls after the 1964 military coup, only half of the country's 200,000 self-employed lawyers, doctors and small businessmen filed returns; and 95% of those returns, the government estimated, were false. In fact, the country's economists claimed that, if all Brazilians paid their taxes and businessmen brought home the $400 million they had stashed in foreign banks, Brazil could even do without foreign...
...payroll deductions and official inspection of private bank accounts. An economist and accountant with 22 years' experience in tax work, Travancas was a natural choice to head the program. He began by weeding out dishonest tax collectors and setting up special training programs for new recruits. To find Brazil's big spenders, Travancas' agents combed membership lists in race-track and yacht clubs, studied society columns, watched overseas flights and sailings, and compiled lists of the most prominent bankers, industrialists, ranchers and other businessmen in every city. Then the tax men went to work on their returns...
When Costa e Silva took office last March and promised some relief from Castello Branco's brand of austerity, Brazil's upper classes began pressuring him to relieve them of Travancas. Costa held off, waiting for the right moment. It finally came when, during a television interview in Sao Paulo, Travancas described a big new crackdown on 3,000 delinquent companies. "If we were to look into all business returns in Sao Paulo," Travancas told his interviewer, "there would not be enough jail space to hold the tax evaders." Asked if a concentration camp were not the answer...
Like all such bubbles, the one in Brazil may burst, or at least shrink. Many a deed buyer, making the first visit to his acreage, has found that it is 24 hours by Jeep from the nearest city, or that he must put in roads, irrigation and other costly improvements before it has any lasting value. While a few U.S. farmers say that they can grow everything from rice to cotton in the soil of Goias and Bahia, others have found their land nearly infertile. Since homesteads are not staked out and land records in Brazil are chaotic, ownership, moreover...