An Engineer Takes the Helm of Portugal's Tax Authority, Ending Helena Borges's Eleven-Year Tenure
Mario Campos, a systems engineer who has spent a decade inside the tax office, became director-general of Portugal's Tax and Customs Authority on 1 August, ending Helena Borges's eleven-year tenure and making digital transformation and the fight against evasion his priorities.
Portugal’s tax office has a new person in charge for the first time in more than a decade. On Friday 1 August, Mário Campos formally took over as director-general of the Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira (Tax and Customs Authority, or AT) — the body that runs everything from the annual IRS income-tax season to VAT, property taxes and the NIF taxpayer numbers that every resident and foreign buyer needs. His arrival ends the eleven-year tenure of Helena Borges, who had led the AT since March 2015.
Campos, 51, is an insider rather than a political appointee. A graduate in electrical and computer engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon’s leading engineering school) in 1997, he spent time at Caixa Geral de Depósitos (the state-owned bank), at Andersen Consulting — now Accenture — and at Deloitte before joining the tax administration. Since March 2016 he had served as the AT’s subdirector-general for information systems, the office that keeps the tax authority’s vast digital machinery running. He was picked in June through a public competition run by the Comissão de Recrutamento e Seleção para a Administração Pública (Public Administration Recruitment and Selection Commission, or Cresap), beating the rival candidates Nuno Santos Félix and Fernando Campos Pereira; the Finance Minister, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, signed his appointment on 26 June for a five-year mandate that runs to 2031.
An engineer for a digital tax office
The choice of a systems specialist is telling. Portugal’s tax administration has built one of Europe’s more aggressive digital-reporting regimes — e-invoicing, the e-Fatura receipt system, pre-filled tax returns and automatic refunds — and Campos has set out four stated priorities that lean heavily on that legacy: lifting voluntary compliance while cracking down on evasion, rebuilding public trust through clearer communication, pushing digital transformation with a stronger focus on security, and shoring up an ageing, stretched workforce. That last point is not abstract. The union that represents tax inspectors, the Sindicato dos Trabalhadores dos Impostos (STI), whose president Gonçalo Rodrigues welcomed the change after what he called “fifteen years of setback” in technology, has long complained that the AT is short of staff and running on dated systems.
For residents and foreign taxpayers, a change at the top of the AT rarely produces overnight change at the counter, but the direction matters. The authority has been squeezing more revenue out of the same base: it clawed back a record €1.55 billion in enforced debt in 2025, and has just wrapped up this year’s IRS settlements, with the last refunds due by the end of August.
The end of the Borges era
Helena Borges leaves after an unusually long run at the helm of a technical body that has weathered several changes of government. She was appointed in 2015 under Pedro Passos Coelho’s administration, in the wake of the so-called “VIP list” controversy over preferential treatment of high-profile taxpayers, and was kept on when António Costa’s Socialists took office in 2016, then reappointed in 2021. Her successor inherits an administration that is more automated than ever but still leans on inspectors and call-centre staff who feel under-resourced — and a government counting on the AT to keep the money flowing as it drafts the 2027 State Budget.
