ICMS Technical report.

Challenge: The Complementary Law No. 194/2022, dated 06/23/2022, established that fuels, natural gas, electricity, communications, and public transportation are essential and indispensable goods and services, determining a limit on the ICMS tax rate across the 27 federal units of Brazil. With this reduction, companies providing these services had to adapt to the new rates, meeting the deadlines and requirements established by law. A telecommunications company requested 7COMm to conduct a technical and impartial assessment, in the form of a Fairness Opinion, to review the approach adopted in system adjustments and operational procedures required to comply with the legislation, ensuring the correct application of the benefits to all customers, regardless of the plan, product, or service contracted. This assessment needed to determine whether the company, within its operational reality, was taking the necessary measures with urgency, caution, and in the shortest possible time to reduce the ICMS tax rate applied to its telecommunications invoices across different states in the country and the Federal District.

What was done: 7COMm conducted this assessment considering the various systems and processes involved in the tariffing solution, the products impacted by this tax, and the types of contracts in both individual and corporate segments. The methodology adopted included:

• Understanding the approach adopted by Vivo to reduce the ICMS tax rate, lower its product prices, and consolidate a macro view, based on the A3 problem-solving method;
• Analysis of the necessary system processes, based on the evidence provided by the client, to evaluate whether all possible actions were taken, within systemic and operational capacity, to implement the adjustments in the shortest time possible, ensuring easy access to the details of the procedures and rationale adopted by the company;
• Support diagrams (timeline/deliverables/precedence) to aid in the complex system architecture of the company (multiple products, services, plans, and offers);
• Consolidation of the mapping of the main systems impacted by the tax reduction;
• A conclusion with a final opinion.

Results obtained:

• Agility in all stages of the process through effective management of implementations, measurgin the completion percentages of the process vs. customer base, including precedence and concurrency analysis of production routine processing
• Effective support for the compliance of the system adjustments made by the telecommunications company to meet the requirements of the Federal Government.