The Ministry of Taxes and Duties (MTS) has come up with an idea to accommodate entrepreneurs who do not want to spend money on double-entry bookkeeping. In order to free companies from the need to keep accounting and tax records simultaneously, the head of the MTS department, Karen Oganyan, has proposed to delete three articles at once from the chapter of the Tax Code on profit tax, which concern the procedure for determining expenses, and simply replace them with a reference to the accounting rules. Entrepreneurs hope that this is only the beginning of the accounting reform, but officials from other ministries do not share Oganyan's approach.

The author of the amendments to the Tax Code, Karen Oganyan, head of the Department of Profit Taxation of the Ministry of Taxes and Duties, told Vedomosti about them. According to him, the point of the amendments is to "exclude the mechanism for determining the amount of expenses, which is prescribed in Articles 318 - 320 of the Tax Code, and to give the taxpayer the opportunity to determine the types of direct expenses and the procedure for distributing them to the balances of unfinished production and to manufactured products, using the mechanism that he uses in accounting." In other words, in this part, tax accounting will again be replaced by accounting.

Tax accounting appeared on January 1, 2002, when Chapter 25 of the Tax Code "On Profit Tax" came into force. Before that, companies only kept accounting reports and calculated taxes on their basis. When the Ministry of Taxes and Duties introduced tax accounting, it explained the need for this step by the huge discrepancies between accounting and tax rules for determining profit, as well as the complexity of monitoring how enterprises adjust their profit for tax purposes.

Oganyan is convinced that the adoption of his amendments "will significantly simplify the calculation of income tax and reduce the level of expenses of organizations for these purposes." Partner of Deloitte & Toushe Alexander Bragin agrees with him: "The Tax Code does not take into account the specifics of industries when determining indirect costs. And accounting legislation has long worked on this topic. It contains detailed methodological recommendations for all occasions. This will really simplify the life of accountants and auditors." General Director of the company "Auditfinprom" Irina Gushcha was convinced from the very beginning that the two types of accounting will not get along with each other: "The accounting community warned that if both accounting exist simultaneously, enterprises will stop keeping full-fledged accounting. The main thing for them is to pay taxes and live in peace." And the leading auditor of the company "United Consultants FDP" Alexander Pogrebs fears that tax officials "are going down the path of excesses." In his opinion, it is impossible to completely exclude from the Tax Code the provisions on determining expenses for tax accounting, because “there are many industries for which this system is convenient, for example, retail trade and the production of consumer goods.”

Not only companies, but also tax officials themselves are interested in simplifying accounting. A year ago, the State Duma adopted "technical" amendments to the chapter of the Tax Code on profit tax, which allow taxpayers to independently choose a tax accounting system that is convenient for them. Having begun to check the reports for 2002, tax officials encountered an unpleasant surprise - they had to understand the intricacies of the tax accounting systems of each individual company.

Oganyan's proposals have not yet been agreed upon with his colleagues and management. Mikhail Orlov, head of the tax policy department at the Ministry of Economic Development, does not believe that Oganyan's amendments are capable of solving the problem of accounting confusion. The Ministry of Economic Development proposes to abandon the Russian accounting reporting system altogether, replacing it with IFRS, and retaining tax accounting. The Ministry of Finance, according to Deputy Finance Minister Mikhail Motorin, will insist on the mandatory nature of all three types of accounting. But entrepreneurs are convinced that maintaining three reporting systems is too expensive, and propose establishing one mandatory financial accounting system that a company will choose based on its needs. "Tax accounting is necessary only for the correctness and completeness of tax payments to the budget," says Ekaterina Yemelyanova, deputy head of the RSPP committee on tax and budget policy. "Therefore, the calculation of taxable profit must be made by adjusting accounting data, as is done throughout the world."

The Ministry of Taxes is tired of tax accounting