The Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad, praised this Tuesday (30) the National Congress for approving the bill that extends the Emergency Program for the Resumption of the Services Sector (Perse), to encourage the events sector, until December 2026. 
“I want to thank the Chamber and the Senate once again for having approved this restriction that was made in Perse with rules that filter the program and establish a governance that puts the idea of the Budget approved last year into practice”, said Haddad, in an interview to journalists.
The proposal approved today by the Senate sets a ceiling of R$15 billion in tax waivers and reduces the activities benefiting from the program from 44 to 30. The text approved by the senators maintained the rules that had already been approved last week by the Chamber of Deputies. Now, the project goes to presidential sanction.
“Contrary to what the headlines sometimes suggest: ‘House and Senate approve spending’, in fact, what happened was exactly the opposite. The Chamber and Senate, and I thank both Arthur Lira and Rodrigo Pacheco, disciplined and they moralized a program that was causing a lot of problems, not because of Congress, but because the design allowed it to be circumvented. And this was definitely corrected”, said Haddad.
“Now all companies will have to qualify. And when we do the qualification, they start to consume credit that the program foresees until the end of 2026. Today this is a well-designed program”, he added.
During the interview, the minister also celebrated the results of the National Household Sample Survey (Pnad), which showed a 7.9% drop in the unemployment rate in the first quarter of 2024 and also the publication of the positive balance of formal jobs.
“We closed the quarter with job creation, with 719 thousand new vacancies in Brazil in the first quarter. This is a very substantive, very important number. One of President Lula’s goals is to return to the levels of job creation at the time when he governed Brazil,” he said.
“PNAD also had the best number in ten years. This is combined with something very important, which is controlled inflation. We are combining job creation with very controlled inflation in these first months of the year”, he highlighted.
Exemption
Regarding the criticisms of the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD-MG), about the government’s action to overturn the payroll tax exemption for companies and city halls until 2027, Haddad said that the government is open to “perfecting the relationship” with the Legislature.
“The government has no difficulty in its relationship with the two Houses, quite the opposite,” he said. “We are bound by solid opinions on this matter, and we cannot sin by omission, under penalty of liability. Those in the Executive have some duties and responsibilities, including those of control bodies, which require the Executive to take action,” he added.
For Pacheco, the action was a primary error by the Executive and generated a crisis of confidence in the relationship between the Powers.
