A Study of the Ownership`s Remuneration Through Tax Planning

Abstract

Reducing the cost of business through tax planning is recurring topic, both in academic research, as in business practice. This work aims to study the ownership`s remuneration of companies that pay income tax based on “Lucro Real”, namely the distribution of profits (dividend payments), interest on owner`s capital and pro-labor payment. Special emphasis was given to the pro-labor payment, modeled using actuarial mathematics, to incorporate the effect of shareholder’s post-retirement social security benefit, in the calculation of effective rates of the remuneration’s types. The effective rate is defined as the ratio between the amount actually paid to the government and the amount originally available for taxation. The effective tax rate should be considered by the actuarial present value due to the fact that some taxes have cash flow’s effects in different dates (payments, receipts and refunds) of the person or legal entity. Present value must be actuarial because, besides the financial discount rate that represents the opportunity cost of a second-best investment, it was considered, because the focus of tax planning to be in the wealth of the individual, the probability of the individual receiving the value in the future. In other words, one must consider the probability of the individual being alive at the moment will be entitled to receive the values. As a result, it was observed that the inclusion of actuarial discount on remuneration of partners significantly modify what can be considered as a cheaper or less expensive compensation. Contrary to what one might infer, interest on capital may not be the cheapest form of remuneration from the company (with 15% effective rate), but small amounts of payment of pro-labor (which have values ??up to 8.61% effective rate).