Helena Borges Hands Parliament an Audit of 31 Benefícios Fiscais Covering 77% of Despesa Fiscal — U-TAX Queues ICE and Ten Expiring Incentives Inside the 540-Benefit Universe Holding at 5-7% of GDP Since 2019

The Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira (Tax and Customs Authority, AT) closed a longer arc of its post-Brussels tax-expenditure-reform mandate on Thursday as director-general Helena Borges tabled a structured audit of 31 benefícios fiscais (fiscal benefits) before the Comissão de Orçamento, Finanças e Administração Pública (Budget, Finance and Public Administration Commission) at the Assembleia da República. The 31 audited carve-outs cover 77% of total Portuguese despesa fiscal (tax expenditure) — the fiscal-cost shorthand for revenue the state forgoes through preferential rates, exemptions and allowances — making the read the closest Lisbon has come to a coherent baseline against the roughly 540 individual benefit lines that sit inside the consolidated tax code.

The audit was produced by the Unidade Técnica de Avaliação de Políticas Fiscais e Aduaneiras (Technical Unit for Tax and Customs Policy Evaluation, U-TAX) under director Isabel Dias Proença, the AT's standing review body for fiscal incentives. U-TAX's pipeline now carries 11 more benefits actively under evaluation: ten are sitting on incentives whose statutory sunset clauses fall due across 2026-2027 — the standard four-year benefit cycle written into the Estatuto dos Benefícios Fiscais (Tax Benefits Statute, EBF) — and the eleventh is the Incentivo à Capitalização das Empresas (Company Capitalisation Incentive, ICE), the IRC (Imposto sobre o Rendimento das Pessoas Coletivas, Corporate Income Tax) deduction for retained earnings that Mário Centeno's last Finance Ministry round had layered into the corporate tax base.

The structural read from the U-TAX work argues that the Portuguese tax-expenditure book is bottom-heavy in noise: roughly 60% of the 540 benefit lines move less than €1 million in foregone revenue per year, the threshold at which the cost of compliance and audit infrastructure outweighs the fiscal stake. Borges told the commission that the total despesa fiscal envelope has held inside a 5-7% of Gross Domestic Product band since 2019, a stability that masks a steady reshuffling between IVA (Imposto sobre o Valor Acrescentado, Value Added Tax) preferential rates, IRC carve-outs anchored by the Sistema de Incentivos Fiscais à Investigação e Desenvolvimento Empresarial (Business R&D Tax Incentive System, SIFIDE) and the ICE, and IRS (Imposto sobre o Rendimento das Pessoas Singulares, Personal Income Tax) lines tied to the Residente Não Habitual (Non-Habitual Resident, RNH) regime and the disability allowance.

Two further evaluations were flagged for the next U-TAX cycle: the IRS-Jovem young-worker income-tax reduction inscribed in the 2025 Orçamento do Estado (State Budget, OE) and a successor read on the RNH regime that the Government overhauled in 2024. Both carry the cross-cutting question that the European Commission's tax-expenditure guidance pushes member states to address — whether the foregone revenue is buying the labour-market or investment behaviour the incentive was scoped to generate, or whether it is simply windfalling existing taxpayer flows. Proença flagged that international benchmarking of fiscal incentives remains structurally difficult because Brussels member states quantify tax expenditure on inconsistent methodological bases, a caveat Helena Borges asked the deputies to keep in mind when reading the headline 5-7% of GDP band against German or Dutch comparators.