In previous articles, we discussed the concept of Eventos that the Brazil tax authority was evaluating.  And as always, the first wave of inbound receiving mandates are already hitting specific industries.  Currently, the concept of Eventos is mandated to be implemented for Oil and Gas companies. The mandates fall into two basic industry categories:

Production Environment must be live:

• For Fuel Distribution Companies     :  March 1st, 2013
• Gas Stations and Resale companies:  July 1st, 2013

 The reason the government is changing and forcing this new process: The Brazilian SEFAZ wants to create controls preventing transportation fraud as well as NF-e cancellations after the delivery of goods.   Unscrupulous suppliers were creating “ghost” transactions at end of month using the tax id of existing customers without their awareness.  Transactions were then canceled later without consequence to the sending party. This process was and is being utilized to ship product illegally.

What do Oil & Gas companies have to do:

In short: The receiver of a NF-e or CT-e, a transportation invoice, will send an Acknowledgement to the government for each document received.

Functionality that your solution needs to have in order to comply with the full Eventos process includes:

• Inbound Nota Fiscal validation engine
  • Validate all Inbound NFe
  • Validate all Inbound CTe
• Deep ERP integration to trigger and monitor the “Eventos” creation, this should not be a separate box or require management of separate middleware.  This should be a direct extension of your ERP.  If you have to monitor ERP, a middleware integration to the NFe solution, a middleware connection to the SEFAZ and back; your organization is looking at a production support headache
• Ability to download the XML from the SEFAZ after the Acknowledgement Eventos is sent to the government
• Once a receiver send the ACK to the SEFAZ, they are allowed to download the XML from the government portal. This feature of the legislation should provide great benefit for the buyer. If the company receives the DANFE, a paper representation that must accompany the truck, without the XML, a deeply integrated solution will be able to automatically download the XML from the SEFAZ. This eliminates the need or issues associated with having suppliers sending the XML.
• In essence, with the introduction of Eventos, the Brazilian government is becoming an eInvoicing network with two way communication between the Buyer and Suppliers.
• Ability to coordinate the Goods Receipt transaction in your ERP as the Good Receipt will be required in order to generation the additional confirmation