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The Federal Revenue Service retired Dirf, and the migration to eSocial and EFD-Reinf caused discrepancies that led 257,000 additional declarations to the Income Tax audit, raising the total withheld to over 1 million (6.96% of submissions until April 23), a jump from last year’s 5.22%.
More than one million Brazilians who filed their Income Tax in 2026 have their tax life stuck in the audit due to errors they did not commit. The cause is the extinction of Dirf, a classic document that companies used annually to consolidate employee earnings with the Federal Revenue Service, replaced by a monthly collection system via eSocial and EFD-Reinf that proved more complex than theory promised and generated inconsistencies that pushed 257,000 additional declarations into the Income Tax audit. The Federal Revenue Service classifies the situation as “manageable” and states that the effect is “specific, tending to be reduced throughout the campaign,” but for those on the other side of the screen who see their declaration blocked without having done anything wrong, the experience is frustrating.
The problem affects workers who correctly followed the guidelines and used the income statement provided by the company. Edilson Bastos, a building technician in Bahia, filed his Income Tax based on the official employer document and still fell into the audit: “I thought the error was mine, it was a hassle,” he reports. Bastos’s case is repeated in hundreds of thousands of situations across the country, and the blame falls on companies that failed to adapt to the pace of updates required by the new system, generating data conflicts that the Revenue interprets as divergence and automatically withholds.
Why Dirf’s retirement caused this chaos in the tax audit
Dirf functioned as a safe harbor for the Brazilian tax system for decades. The document was filled out once a year by companies, consolidating all paid earnings and withheld taxes for each employee in a single submission that the Federal Revenue Service cross-referenced with individual taxpayer declarations to verify consistency. The format was simple: the company reported the annual total, the worker declared the same amount, and if the numbers matched, the declaration passed the tax audit without problems.
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From 2025, this model was replaced by monthly collection via eSocial and EFD-Reinf, systems that require events such as vacations, terminations, and payments to be reported exactly in the month they occur. The change, which replaced 15 old forms and promised simplification, in practice increased the volume of transmitted data and the complexity of companies’ obligations, which now need to ensure perfect monthly synchronization between payroll and the digital system. Any delay in launching vacations, classification errors, or cent discrepancies between months generates a conflict that the Revenue system interprets as inconsistency and sends the worker’s declaration directly to the Income Tax audit.
What companies did wrong to block employees’ tax audits
The error is not necessarily negligence. eSocial requires a level of detail and punctuality that many human resources departments were not prepared to deliver, and the accumulation of work to adjust data in a timely manner was inevitable, as pointed out by Francielly Chicon, a payroll processing specialist. The problem is structural: companies that had an entire year to check and correct information before submitting Dirf now need to get each month right individually, and the margin for retroactive correction is smaller.
Industry entities such as ABRH and Sescon-SP criticize the absence of a transition period. For these specialists, Dirf should have operated in parallel for another year while companies adapted to the new model, a strategy that would have allowed identifying discrepancies before they affected the tax audits of thousands of innocent taxpayers. The Federal Revenue Service opted for an abrupt cut, and the result is 257,000 declarations withheld due to synchronization failures between systems that most taxpayers don’t even know exist.
What to do if your declaration fell into the tax audit due to a company error
Anyone who has already submitted their Income Tax and found a pending issue in the system needs to act quickly. The first step is to contact the HR department of the employing company and inform them that the declaration is held in the tax net due to data discrepancy, because the correction needs to be made by the paying source in eSocial, not by the taxpayer in their own declaration. Once the company rectifies the monthly data in the system, the pending issue in the tax net is usually resolved automatically in approximately one week, without the worker needing to do anything but wait.
If the company sends a new corrected income statement, the taxpayer will need to update their declaration. In this case, it is necessary to file an amending Income Tax declaration, replacing the previous values with the data from the new document, a procedure that can be performed using the Federal Revenue Service program or the My Income Tax application. The rectification updates the information with the Tax Authority, and as long as the new data matches what the company corrected in eSocial, the declaration will be released from the tax net without the need to schedule an in-person appointment or send additional documents.
What to do if you haven’t submitted your declaration yet and want to avoid the tax net
For those who have not yet declared Income Tax, the Federal Revenue Service’s guidance is direct: prioritize the income statement provided by the company. If the statement is correct and the pre-filled declaration shows different values, trust the company’s document and manually fill in the fields with the statement’s data, because the pre-filled declaration might be carrying eSocial information that has not yet been corrected by the paying source. The difference between following the statement and following the pre-filled declaration can be exactly what separates an approved declaration from one held in the tax net.
The final deadline for submission is May 29, at 11:59 PM. Those who miss the deadline are subject to a minimum fine of R$ 165.74, a penalty that applies regardless of whether the declaration has amounts to pay or not, and which may increase according to the tax due. The recommendation is not to wait until the last days to declare, especially this year when the risk of falling into the tax net due to third-party error is significantly higher: the sooner the taxpayer identifies any pending issue, the more time they will have to request correction from the company before the deadline.
What the tax net numbers reveal about the Federal Revenue Service’s digital transition
The jump from 5.22% to 6.96% of declarations held in the tax net between 2025 and 2026 is a metric that translates the real cost of a technological transition implemented without a safety net. The Federal Revenue Service acknowledges that eSocial unified the submission of information and eliminated 15 old forms, a genuine technical advance that in the long run will make the tax system more precise and less dependent on consolidated annual declarations. But the short term has taken its toll: over a million taxpayers in the tax net, companies overwhelmed with monthly obligations they don’t fully master, and workers blaming themselves for errors they didn’t commit.
The Federal Revenue Service’s promise is that problems will decrease as companies become familiar with the new system. If this prediction is confirmed, the 2027 numbers should return to normal levels, and the tax net will only receive declarations with real discrepancies instead of artifacts of a poorly calibrated transition. Until then, the Brazilian taxpayer pays the price for a modernization that no one asked for but which, according to the Federal Revenue Service, everyone will appreciate when it works properly.
And you, did you fall into the tax net this year? Was the error yours or the company’s? Leave your opinion in the comments.
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