Sinief Act 26/22 was published on 6 July in the Official Gazette, amending the Sinief Act 01/21, which establishes a differentiated treatment of ICMS applicable to natural gas processing.

The Sinief Act 26/22 aims at improving and bringing greater legal certainty to the activities related to the processing of natural gas hired by third parties, an essential activity for the opening and development of the natural gas market.

Among the changes brought, the following stand out:

  • The provision of symbolic transfer operations between establishments of the same taxpayer located in the same state, prior to the shipment of unprocessed natural gas for industrialization, or to enable mutual operations with third parties (clause 2nd, item XII, clause eleventh, paragraph 2nd and clause twenty, paragraph 4th);
  • The extension of the deadline for issuing fiscal documents to the 4th business day of the following month in specific situations (clause twelfth, item I, 'a' and clause sixteenth item I, 'a');
  • The suppression of the requirement in the sense that the complementar invoices related to the return of natural gas and by products should be issued in a "proportional" way, in cases in which it is not possible to make reference to all invoices required by the rule in a single invoice related to the return (clause thirteenth, paragraph 3rd);
  • The provision of mutual operations of processed natural gas, with the purpose of making the quantities injected into the pipelines connected to the Natural Gas Processing Unit (UPGN) compatible with the quantities actually allocated to a given player by the manufacturer (i.e., UPGN owner) (clause seventeenth-A);
  • The provision of new agents able to obtain accreditation from the Treasury secretariats (twenty-first clause); and
  • The inclusion of the systematic of issuance of tax documents and collection of ICMS similar to the provisions of Sinief Act 22/21 (clause twenty-second).

The changes represent an important advance for the opening of the natural gas market in Brazil enabling greater access to essential infrastructure, diversity of agents and greater competition.