Our Business

Tax

The complexity of tax legislation associated with increasingly sophisticated tax collection systems means that taxpayers need to be gradually more efficient and proactive in the tax sector, thus being able to keep their competitive advantage in the market.

Our aim is precisely to simplify this flow: legislation> interpretation> application. We understand the relevance of this topic for our clients and believe that creativity, when combined with technical knowledge, can contribute effectively to the solution of tax issues.

Relying on experts in the field, we focus our primary efforts to act on tax issues in a preventive manner and, ultimately, being equally prepared to face litigation. For this, we assist our clients with interpretation and application of standards, tax advice, tax planning, follow-up on inspections and litigation in the administrative and judicial domains.

Institutional Investors

We know that the legal relationships involving EFPC, EAPC and RPPS are invariably complex, which require specialization, legal experience and global knowledge of the functioning and business of these institutions.

Our mission is to be the best institutional investors office in Brazil. To accomplish this goal, we see your business in a contextual and systematic way, both to develop solutions adhering to the interests of each entity, and to operate its legal issues.

We are a full-service firm focused on the demands of institutional investors.

Social Security Credit

We develop expertise, techniques and tools to identify and recover, safely and quickly, your social security contributions eventually collected beyond the due amount, thus customizing the operation according to your profile.

FOPAG (Payroll)
What is it?
The FOPAG project specifies opportunities, contingencies and methods of solution, operates suggestions, recovers social security credits and heals eventual contingencies. We carry out legal adherence tests on the parameters that your company uses to define the basis of calculation of the social security contribution. Thus, we determine any contingencies and identify and assess the rating of each error parameter that may lead to surplus payment of social security contributions.
What is the scope?
The process is not only focused on the payroll, covering all social security contributions, such as incidents of work cooperatives, sponsorship or licensing for football clubsbut it also covers those assigned for special retirement expenses, among others.
How does it work?
The quality of each opportunity and the method of recovery are based on the management criteria adopted by your company. Thus, we obtain a detailed and specific scenario of contingencies and opportunities unique to you, always bringing the ideal solution model.
RAT / SAT
What is it?
The RAT / SAT project accurately determines and accurately defines the fair rate for contribution, whether 1%, 2% or 3%, based on the company's main economic activity.
What is the scope?
In addition to security in the management of the contribution, the RAT / SAT project allows the recovery of social security credit and / or the reduction of such cost, especially when the identified rate is lower than that practiced.
How does it work?
Using tools specifically developed for this project, we enable the simulation of several organizational scenarios of the company, generating alternatives for a better management of the contribution.
Statute of Limitations Project
What is it?
We analyze all social security contributions paid or provisioned in labor litigation, evaluating whether they were paid or provisioned in a correct manner.
Scope
About 15% of the labor litigation liability consists of social security contributions. Even so, companies manage the liability as if it were entirely labor-related, and with this, many undue social security contributions are paid in the context of labor litigation.
How does it work?
Once we have identified the wrong provisioning, we operate the whole process of recovering the unduly paid contribution, including the reversal of improperly provisioned contribution from the company’s liability.
Expatriates
What is it?
We adjust the social security relations of expatriate employees to international legislation, making it possible, in most cases, to generate social security credit based on the recovery of social security contributions levied on such employee remuneration that were unduly paid.
Scope
Brazil subscribes international treaties and agreements on Social Security. Despite effectiveness, these standards are often neglected by companies, generating excess payment and, eventually, contingency for the expatriate employee.
How does it work?
From the assessment of employee paycheque, incomes are scaled to reflect the provisions of the relevant treaty, generating tax savings for your company, as well as due legal compliance.
CPRB
What is it?
We analyze the various opportunities for your company to adapt to the new system of collection of social security contributions, either to maintain payroll consistency or to plan to substantially reduce its social security cost.
Scope
The CPRB (Social Security Contribution on Gross Revenue) brought innovation to the social security legislation, replacing, for some companies, the calculation of the social security payment based on the payroll for contribution over revenue. This seemingly simple change has spawned several strategic opportunities.

Social Security Liabilities

We understand that the social security liability is not limited to tax assessments and violation notices pertaining to social security contributions, while we see all the multidisciplinarity necessary to deal with this matter. The granting of a secondary social security benefit, for example, triggers a series of disconnected liabilities to the company, from a possible stability of the employee to return to work, passing through a possible recovery action filed by INSS based on the cost borne with the benefit, until the maintenance of the payment of the FGTS in the period of dismissal of the employee.

Management of Social Security Risk (GRP)
What is it?
We have developed a multidisciplinary project that identifies all the social security risks borne by the company, including liabilities for social security contributions and those resulting from occupational accidents, then presenting intelligent, customized and coordinated solutions to cure or manage those risks.
Scope
Social security relations encompass several objects, such as social security contributions, payroll and social security benefits, among others. Despite the autonomy of each, there is a connection that generates successive consequences, causing liability of several natures.
How does it work?
The GRP Project is not limited to the identification of documentary deficiencies or parameters, but it also addresses the processes and procedures adopted by the company. After understanding and critiquing our current workflow, we have designed the best strategy for the internal management of social security relations, in order to adequately conduct a social security inspection or manage an accident event or occupational disease, among other solutions.
Inspections
What is it?
We have developed a procedure to handle social security inspections, conducting them in a way to reduce the impact of a possible violation notice or, at least, allowing a more adequate defense.
Scope
The defense of a social security violation notice starts in the inspection phase, mainly in the verification of the characteristics and aspects of the events of the payroll objects of the inspection. The absence of definition of the concept of remuneration events generates a dangerous casuism because the remuneration paid in one company, even if it has the same nomenclature, may have a completely different legal meaning in another. The massification of knowledge has also reached social security oversight, requiring more and more companies to demonstrate and prove the reasons behind a particular position.
Violation Notices
What is it?
We analyze each case in a customized and strategic way, pondering, simultaneoulsy, possibilities for the mitigation of liabilities in addition to the traditional litigation. Our management goes far beyond monitoring the process or producing petitions and adequate defense resources. We produce statistical reports and develop proper contingency methods, determining liabilities according to their fair value.
Scope
The quality of a defense is directly connected to the perfect understanding of the violation notice and the evidence that backed the inspection and defense fundamentals, as well as the quicker identification of the best strategy. The systematic monitoring of legislative activity and the modeling of the history of the installments allow us to anticipate opportunities, managing the litigation from these alternatives.
FAP
What is it?
We have identified several ways of managing the FAP (Accident Prevention Factor), from defense motions to systematic administration of the data that compose it. Regarding the defense motions, we have developed a system that allows us to identify the imperfections of the FAP and submit defense motions in a fast, technical and casuistic way. Although necessary and effective, motions will be constant, and the best medium-term solution involves compliance, thus reducing FAP data at its source.
Scope
The FAP was created to individualize the companies of the same economic activity, reducing the RAT / SAT rate of the best performers in reducing environmental risks. Although adequate, the objective was not reached, because the FAP was not able to capture the real performance of the companies, unjustly harming those with more employees.
Recovery Actions
What is it?
Once the company's fault has been identified for the accident or illness that generated the social security benefit, the INSS may sue the company for the costs resulting from the maintenance of these benefits. These actions, once rare and very specific, have become an alternative of collection, being fied to recover one or several benefits granted.

Capital markets

The Capital Markets area is strategic to achieving our mission of practicing Law in a unique and differentiated way.

The experience of our team in alternative markets, such as securitization and distressed, allows us to reach the next level in the area of ​​investment structuring, thus offering innovative services to our clients.

Our services are based, above all, on a business perspective that is closer to the customer. Our team is prepared to analyze the market from the perspective of the final investor, the issuer and also the inspection. Hence, we operate in the capital markets with the main objective of structuring customized operations, offering complex instruments to facilitate the relationship between issuers and their target audience.

Therefore, in addition to advising our clients in public and private offerings, we work at all stages to establish funds, prepare regulations and conduct general meetings.

Likewise, we participate in the most diverse aspects of the relationship between the capital market and its regulators, through the monitoring of asset performance, risk management, renegotiations and debt restructurings, as well as the drafting of corporate acts and collateral agreements to funds and other means of corporate financing. These are services that we provide with the highest degree of caution, in full alignment with client's goals.

Business Intelligence

It is a business management tool that allows to systemically collect, organize, analyze, share and monitor strategic information from a business perspective. Usually, it is used to manage strategic procedures with complex operational flow. Why not carry these concepts and premises to optimize the management of your litigation?

Legal proceedings represent a major liability for companies. Despite their relevance, these liabilities are priced and managed without methodology and, in most cases, in a subjective and discretionary manner.

Associating Statistics with Legal and Accounting knowledge, we developed models for pricing and management of judicial liabilities, marking in a fair and real way the price of judicial liabilities. In addition to giving security to the financial statements, the model allows better management of the litigation, either in the form of remuneration of the offices contracted for its management or for the solution by means of mediation or transaction techniques.

The dynamism and customization of the model allows the perfect definition of the liabilities, reducing costs with experts, accountants and other demands.

Labor

As we all know, work relationships greatly affect business management. On the other hand, the management of these relations necessarily implies the interpretation and application of the labor legislation, which is quite complex.

In this scenario, our advice seeks to simplify the legislation, providing the most different explanations to our clients, ranging from everyday simple issues to the most complex ones. Our objective is to propose new solutions aimed at mitigating the risks involved.

In addition to the preventive practice, we also work in the area of ​​litigation, where we coordinate labor proceedings pertaining to various issues in a strategic way, being attentive to the jurisprudence trends.

From our advisory services (consulting and litigation), which also includes support and conduction of collective bargaining, we aim to propose new alternatives for the closing, at least reduction, of conflicts arising from labor relations, therefore contributing to the increase of efficiency of our clients' businesses.

Civil

With professionals specialized in various areas of Civil Law, our firm has a broad consultation role in relation to contractual aspects, foreclosures, collections, evictions, consumer rights and inventories in order to mitigate the existence of future litigation, whenever it cannot be prevented.

For this purpose, our professionals are always available to deliver legal opinions and advise our clients, from the drafting to execution and analysis of contracts, encompassing a broad spectrum of Civil Law-related issues.

Corporate Law

Even before their birth and throughout the period in which they remain alive, companies face bureaucracies, routines, problems arising from the complicated and extensive commercial and business legislation.

We act from the planning and structuring of business and corporate activities, constitution of companies, organization of joint ventures, consortiums, associations, foundations, registries of foreign investments in the Central Bank, partnership and other forms of exploration of businesses and ventures, corporate contracts, statutes, shareholders' agreements, consortium agreements, minutes and other corporate documents, as well as to carry out legal due dilgences and assist in corporate organization, including splits, mergers and acquisitions, privatization and liquidation of companies.

As a result, our specialists seek to present holistic support, covering all aspects of business life, even participating and guiding our clients in the operations of buying and selling of equity interests, financed acquisitions and public offerings of shares, as well as in the resolution of disputes and divergences between partners.

MIS

The Marketing Information System (MIS) is a data collection and monitoring, as well as an information management system that designs scenarios to enable strategic decision making that is safer, more efficient and more objective.

The need for an explosion of information associated with increasing complexity in decision making gives relevancy to MIS as a technological reality that is increasingly present and essential for strategic business planning.

Our MIS structure feeds all areas of expertise of Balera, Berbel and Mitne Advogados, increasing the efficiency of our services. Thus, we can transform raw data of our customers into manageable information, and this information into knowledge to boost their business. In addition to monitoring the services provided, MIS facilitates management decision making.

The main benefit of the system is to improve customer service and support, with information available more and more quickly and in the format the customer needs. This allows for a greater awareness of the services provided, as well as the translation of the data related to the contracted services into concrete information, simplifying its treatment and giving greater synergy in the internal communication.

Compliance and Governance

We are always attentive to the trends of the corporate market. It is no secret that the pursuit of best governance practices and the implementation of compliance procedures to achieve ethics are hot topics in the corporate world.

Therefore, we advise our clients to perform due diligence and review procedures for corporate acts and structures, acting in a preliminary and preventive manner to these problems, helping our clients to define the strategies and procedures necessary to achieve  best market practices.

We have been able to offer this permanent advisory service to our clients due to the in-house experience of our team in companies and entities that have faced and still undergo major reformulations of their internal culture.

Among our practices, we highlight the assistance in the elaboration of Codes of Ethics and Conduct, a consultancy dedicated to obtaining certifications and public seals that confirm compliance with best market practices, always focused on risk mitigation.

In this way, we have the necessary expertise to assist our clients achieving a differentiated level of transparency, ethics and corporate governance.

Wealth Management

The Wealth Management area was born to meet a growing demand from clients - individuals and family offices - for effective legal solutions to complex issues involving wealth management, tax planning, social security and corporate succession.

Formed by a specialized and multidisciplinary team, Balera, Berbel and Mitne Advogados are prepared to carry out the planning and management of assets of our clients, aiming at tax efficiency, mitigation of legal risks, conservation of assets and the guarantee of the income to senior relatives or for those with work disability.