Insulting a tax official in Portugal for some may be justified, cathartic and satisfying but now is illegal and attracts a fine or a prison term of up to five years.
The 2015 State Budget comes with some interesting nuggets hidden in the small print as next year’s increasingly uncompromising plans for the collection of taxes from everything in Portugal with a pulse comes with some heavyweight powers for those who have chosen to toil in the tax department’s customer-facing offices.
Assaulting, insulting or merely 'disobeying orders' from tax office staff is going to be punishable with a fine or imprisonment, starting when the legislation is passed next year.
The draft laws are unlikely to contain a section on justifiable provocation of the customer by rudeness, smirking, ignoring sensible proposals for repayments and indifference. There are no guidelines proposed for which orders from Finanças staff are acceptable and which are not.
The proposed State Budget for 2015 merely states that the criminal code will invest tax officials with public authority, ‘Any offense against an employee of the Tax and Customs Authority shall be a public crime.’
The move comes at a time when the government is planning to maintain and raise its tax collection game of cat and mouse while seeking to protect employees from assault, a phenomenon that has increased in line with the growing financial crisis.
The president of the Syndicate of Tax Workers, Paulo Ralha, welcomed the new police like status for his members, but believes that "people will continue to be aggressive, as because of the government "we are collecting some debts that we should not be in charge of collecting.”
Ralha refers to the collection of unpaid toll fees and fines, and to fines incurred by fare dodgers on public transport which he sees as civil matters and nothing to do with the State’s coercive collection systems.
In the meatime many tax departments continue to offer self defence courses, maybe as part of employees' continued professional development.
