Use of the public digital bookkeeping system in socio-environmental management in Brazil

In Brazil, due to the growth and evolution of the businesses in volume and values, the registration system has become obsolete and difficult to control by state and federal treasure offices. Without a technological intervention, it would be unfeasible to monitor and control the wealth generated by the nation. Therefore, in 2003, the National Treasury created the Public Digital Bookkeeping System (SPED), which aims to change the compliance with ancillary obligations by taxpayers, replacing all documents in paper, books and accounting and tax documents, for an electronic document model, through a security cryptography. Thus, the main objective of this work was to investigate whether the adoption of SPED obligation reduced the consumption of natural resources at the national level. For this, a research was carried out on the obligations included in the SPED package, in order to quantify the gain brought about by the reduction of deforestation and water consumption from papermaking, based on data available and provided by government websites. Also, we sought to identify other aspects relevant to social and environmental management in terms of reducing the impact on the environment. To answer the great question of this research, we compared the results of the data collected in fifteen years of implementation of the SPED project, which brought relevant results for socio-environmental management and reduction of impact to the environment.