Effects evaluation of the Support Program for the Management of Tax Authorities in Brazil (Profisco) adoption by Synthetic Diff-in-Diff for staggered interventions.
Synthetic Difference-in-Differences; PROFISCO
This paper analyses the effect of the adoption of the Fiscal Administration Modernization on brazilian states (PROFISCO I), financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), on the Tax on the Circulation of Goods and Services (ICMS) collection. Implemented in stages in the federative units since 2009, PROFISCO I reached 23 of the 27 federal unities, promoting the scanning of tax documents and improving the fiscal data processing and analysis by tax administrations. Using an adapted version of the Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDID) estimator (ARKHANGELSKY et al., 2021), the impacts of each adoption of the program were estimated, as well as the way in which these impacts were distributed over time. The tests were performed considering monthly and yearly data aggregation. In general, the estimation results did not have a specific pattern. In addition, very few of these results had statistical significance. The exception is the insertion of exogenous variables in the SDID models in the annual frequency data, a situation in which the effects are positive and significant. It is not evident, therefore, that adoption of the program does necessarily imply an improvement in collection at any time.