Brazil's Tax Authority Takes Over R$66.8B in FGTS Debt Collection

Starting Monday, Brazil's National Treasury Solicitor's Office took exclusive control of collecting roughly 67 billion reais in unpaid FGTS contributions—money that employers were supposed to deposit into worker retirement accounts but never did. The shift moves half a million debt cases away from Caixa Econômica Federal, the bank that had been managing them alongside the Treasury office, into a single government collection apparatus designed to be faster and more aggressive.

The FGTS, created decades ago to protect workers fired without cause, operates on a simple principle: each month, employers deposit 8 percent of each worker's salary into an account held at Caixa. When employers skip those deposits and the debt goes unpaid long enough, it gets inscribed into what Brazil calls "dívida ativa"—active debt, the formal registry of money the government is actively trying to collect. Until this week, Caixa and the Treasury shared responsibility for chasing down these arrears. Now the Treasury handles it alone.

The consolidation is meant to streamline things. The Treasury already manages the government's own unpaid debts using a suite of collection tools—wage garnishment, asset seizure, bans on public contracts, formal protest filings—more than thirty mechanisms in total. Those same tools will now turn toward FGTS debts. In 2025 alone, the Treasury recovered 1.9 billion reais in unpaid FGTS contributions. In just the first two months of this year, it recovered 142 million reais for workers. The office says it can do better with full control.

The transition includes a carrot alongside the stick. In July, the Treasury will announce a settlement program allowing employers to regularize their debts with reduced interest and penalties—an incentive to pay up rather than wait for collection action. Employers who take the deal will have thirty days to itemize exactly which workers are owed what, using a Treasury portal called Regularize. Miss that deadline and they lose the ability to get a FGTS compliance certificate, which many contracts and transactions require.

What changes most for workers is visibility. Right now, a worker with unpaid FGTS contributions often has no way to know the debt exists or how much is owed to them. Starting next year, the Treasury plans to let any Brazilian log into its portal and see if they have FGTS credits pending collection in their name. The office will also notify workers whenever money is recovered on their behalf. Theo Lucas Borges, the Treasury's deputy general counsel for active debt, framed it plainly: workers currently struggle to know what they're owed. That's about to change.

The migration should be complete by month's end. Caixa retains management of debts not yet formally inscribed and of active payment plans still being worked through the bank, as well as the authority to issue FGTS compliance certificates. But the serious collection work—the cases where employers have stopped paying and stopped negotiating—now belongs to the Treasury. Workers can still sue their employers in court if they choose, Borges emphasized, but the government now has machinery those workers don't: the power to freeze assets, block contracts, and move money directly into worker accounts once it's recovered. The question now is whether that machinery, finally pointed at a single target, will actually move the needle on billions in unpaid worker protections.