Part of the SYNAPSE 2026 series | Henrique Santos, Senior Tax Manager, Uber
Real-time tax compliance in LATAM: Why it’s already the global benchmark
When businesses in Europe and North America talk about the future of real-time tax compliance, they are largely describing something that LATAM has been living for decades. The mandates exist. The infrastructure is in place. The authorities are active. For any business operating in the region, real-time compliance is not a planning conversation. It is an operational reality.
Henrique Santos, Senior Tax Manager at Uber, brought that experience to SYNAPSE 2026, Fonoa's annual conference for indirect tax professionals, in a session that was equal parts case study and warning. Uber launched in LATAM into a compliance environment that was already mature. What that taught the team about data, speed, and the cost of getting things wrong is directly relevant to every business watching real-time mandates spread into new markets.
1. When Uber launched in LATAM, the mandates were already there
Most businesses entering a new market build compliance infrastructure as they go. In LATAM, that approach runs into an immediate problem: the mandates do not wait. When Uber launched in the region, real-time e-invoicing requirements were already in place. Compliance had to move fast, but much of the underlying data was still coming from legacy systems.
That gap between operational speed and data quality is where problems start. In a real-time tax environment, there is no window to catch and correct a data issue before it reaches the authority. The data has to be right before it leaves the building, because by the time anyone flags a discrepancy, it has already been filed.
I have real cases where authorities looked at total to the decimal point between e-invoices and reported transactions to determine if there were any discrepancies
— Henrique Santos, Senior Tax Manager at Uber
2. Good data does more than keep you compliant
One of the more valuable points Henrique made was about what well-structured data actually enables beyond compliance. In LATAM, where authorities have long had access to detailed transaction-level data, businesses that invest in data quality gain something beyond a clean filing. They gain the ability to do real analytics on their own operations.
Henrique's example made this concrete: a business with properly structured product data can make informed decisions about how products are classified and priced, with full visibility into the tax implications of those decisions. That kind of decision-making is only possible when the data underneath it is reliable. Poor data does not just create compliance risk. It removes the ability to make smart business decisions in the first place.
3. Compliance is no longer seasonal
The operational shift that real-time mandates demand is significant, and Henrique was direct about it.
Compliance is no longer seasonal. It's not something you do the last or first week of the month. It runs all the time.
— Henrique Santos
That shift has practical consequences. Anomaly detection, real-time monitoring, and governing systems to catch issues as transactions happen are not nice-to-haves in a real-time environment. They are the baseline. Fixing a mistake after the fact in a continuous compliance environment is like trying to repair an engine while the plane is still flying. New transactions are coming in constantly, and the window to correct anything upstream is already closed.
4. Brazil's reform is the biggest test yet
The distinction Henrique drew between Mexico and Brazil captures two different approaches to real-time compliance. Mexico provides tax authorities with real-time access to transaction data. Brazil mandates real-time collection. Different mechanisms, but the same underlying requirement: businesses need to be inside their data continuously.
Brazil's ongoing tax reform raises the stakes further. The core of the system remains e-invoicing, as it has been for decades, but the reform is a significant lift. Pricing structures are changing to reflect tax more transparently. A 28% VAT rate is now in play, the highest globally. The downstream impact on how businesses price, structure, and report their transactions is still being worked through, and the businesses that will navigate it most successfully are the ones that already have the data infrastructure to support continuous compliance.
Bottom line: LATAM shows where real-time compliance leads, and the rest of the world is following
The markets watching real-time mandates arrive in Europe and beyond are not facing something new. They are facing something LATAM has refined over decades. The lesson from Uber's experience is that the time to build the right data infrastructure is before the mandate arrives, not after. Once real-time reporting is live, the ability to course-correct on data quality shrinks dramatically. The foundation has to be in place first.
