Systems built to be trusted.
Knowledge put to work.

Before Sea-Tac and the classroom, there was a ledger. Marcio spent nineteen years in Brazil working in finance and administration, first in a hospital and later in a publishing house. He earned his Tecnólogo diploma in Finance Management from UNINOVE and registered with CRA-SP, the regional council governing the Administration profession. Those years built the foundation for his work with financial records, business operations and the people responsible for keeping them running. Moving to the United States in 2012 opened a new chapter while preserving those professional roots.

In California, teaching business and finance to adult learners gave that experience a new purpose: helping others understand and apply it. AskMarcio.com and Serafim Dpaulla Consultancy, founded in 2010, also kept his professional connection to Brazil active. Today, alongside his TSA work, Marcio continues to support practices in São Paulo and California through cross-border consulting and an ongoing exchange with trusted colleagues. These relationships keep his knowledge connected to everyday accounting work, bringing the perspective of two countries into a practice that continues to develop through experience and learning.

Ask any Brazilian accountant where the real workload lives, and the answer is always the same: o departamento fiscal, the fiscal department. It's a different job from bookkeeping. Bookkeeping records what happened. The fiscal department exists because Brazil requires a company to prove, continuously and in digital form, that what happened was reported correctly, on time, in the right format, to federal, state, and municipal authorities at once.

SPED, Brazil's Public System of Digital Bookkeeping, is what makes that proof possible: twelve linked modules in total, five real-time transaction documents like NF-e and CT-e, and seven periodic filings, including eSocial, ECD, ECF, EFD-Contribuições, EFD-ICMS/IPI, EFD-Reinf, and e-Financeira, all cross-checked by the tax authority's own systems as they arrive.

2026 raises the stakes further. It's the first live test year of Brazil's tax reform. Companies now calculate and report two brand-new taxes, CBS and IBS, in parallel with the ones being phased out, PIS, COFINS, ICMS, and ISS, a transition that runs through 2033. Staying fluent in Brazilian fiscal work this year means learning a second tax system while the first one is still fully active. It's exactly the kind of demand that keeps Marcio's own knowledge current instead of theoretical.