How to argue with money

Deputies introduce pre -trial settlement of tax disputes yesterday the State Duma tax subcommittee completed the consideration of amendments to the government bill on the improvement of tax administration. Before transferring the document to the budget committee, whose meetings under this bill will begin about a month later, deputies made significant changes to it, fundamentally changing the current procedure for the extrajudicial collection of fines for tax offenses. In fact, instead of the current "extrajudicial" parliamentarians proposed to introduce a "pre -trial" procedure for the settlement of tax disputes.

At the same time, the amount of fines, which is currently the main criterion that determines whether or not the tax authorities can write off the fines on their own, that is, without a trial, henceforth, according to the plan of deputies, should not be such.

Recall that the new procedure for recovering tax fines was introduced from January 1, 2006 at the initiative of the presidential administration, where, in fact, they wrote the appropriate law. The bottom line: if earlier tax fines (unlike tax arrears and interest) were the right to recover only through the court, now they received the right to write off the taxpayers out of court of fines up to 50 thousand rubles from organizations to 5 thousand rubles from individual entrepreneurs. Moreover, no specific procedures for writing off such fines capable of protecting taxpayers were never included in the presidential law. Moreover, in fact, it was a partial abolition of the presumption of innocence of taxpayers laid down in the Tax Code. Last fall, the deputies failed to correct the "procedural" deficiencies in the presidential bill. Now a new attempt is being made in the framework of amendments to the government bill on the improvement of tax administration.

Deputies proposed to make the pre -trial procedure for the settlement of tax disputes mandatory for taxpayers. The order is this. First, the tax authority, according to the results of the audit, makes a decision on holding a taxpayer accountable for a tax offense. If the taxpayer does not agree with this decision, he must appeal this decision within 10 days in a higher tax authority. The fact of filing a complaint means that it is not the right to write off something out of court from the taxpayer, even 10 rubles. Moreover, during the consideration of the complaint by a higher tax authority (a month is assigned to this), the execution of the initial decision of the tax authorities is suspended not only in terms of penalties, but also in the part of writing off the arrears and penalties. And only after considering the complaint by a higher tax authority, the taxpayer receives the right to file a lawsuit in court, unless, of course, the decision of the higher authority will not satisfy him.

If the taxpayer does not send the complaint to the higher tax authority within 10 days, this will indicate the absence of a dispute with the tax authorities, and the decision to bring to justice will enter into legal force. Again, regardless of the amount of fines appears in the solution.

“The amount of the fine cannot serve as a criterion confirming the presence or absence of a dispute,” said Andrei Makarov, one of the authors of the amendments, deputy chairman of the budgetary committee of the State Duma. According to him, introducing clear procedures for the pre -trial settlement of tax disputes to the Tax Code, deputies fully return the presumption of the taxpayer's innocence. “In the future, Russia can reach a global level where tax disputes are decided in courts in only 1-3% of cases,” Makarov is sure. The government yesterday as a whole with the proposals of the subcommittee agreed. Entrepreneurs do not mind. According to Sergey Belyakov, Deputy Chairman of the RSP and Budget Policy Committee on Tax and Budget Policy, the business is unprincipled, what are the amounts of fines in the decision of the tax authority, "the main thing is the availability of clear procedures."

03/14/2006 / Galina Lyashenko, the material was published in the "newspaper" No. 43 of 03/15/2006.