Fuel fraud goes from the pump to the financial system
One of the difficulties in combating the illegal fuel market lies in the ability of fraud to change location along the chain. If control increases at one stage, the irregularity may appear at another. When operations target known companies and structures, new technological mechanisms may emerge at the end of the system.
This movement was discussed in the panel "Fraud in the fuel sector: adulteration, tax evasion and organized crime," held during the Illegal Market seminar. The president of the Instituto Combustível Legal (ICL), Emerson Kapaz, presented examples related to taxation.
According to Kapaz, changes adopted for gasoline and diesel reduced opportunities for tax evasion. As a result, the problem became concentrated in ethanol, which still does not follow the same single-phase ICMS collection model applied to other fuels.
In the single-phase system, the tax is collected in a single stage, which reduces collection points and makes tax evasion more difficult. The absence of this model in ethanol would have created a space where enforcement is still weaker, causing fraud to migrate to this product.
