| The government forces the Duma to introduce a temporary water tax The government, it seems, can no longer stop in its tax rule-making. Yesterday, at a meeting of the State Duma tax subcommittee, the government proposed that deputies adopt a temporary 29th chapter of the Tax Code called “Water Tax.” In a few years, this tax will be replaced by non-tax payments.
Today, water tax is already paid by users of water resources, but it is regulated by the law “on fees for the use of water bodies.” This payment, according to Deputy Minister of Finance Sergei Motorin, is collected regularly. Another thing is that the status of the water tax is not very clear now.
On the one hand, the new Water Code approved by the government provides for a transformation in which these payments will move from the category of ordinary mandatory taxes to the “optional” contractual sphere - that is, they will be non-tax in nature. On the other hand, the tax must continue to exist until the licenses issued to water users expire. Therefore, until the expiration of the licenses, enterprises will have to pay the treasury a water payment in the form of a tax.
Until all licenses expire (maximum five years), according to the government, a special chapter of the Tax Code on water tax should be introduced.
Deputies, already puzzled by the government tax package for the spring session, which provides for such epoch-making changes as the reduction of the unified social tax (UST) and the new mechanism for collecting the mineral extraction tax (MET), are not sure of the advisability of working on another chapter of the Tax Code . Moreover, this chapter, according to parliamentarians, regulates obviously not the most serious tax.
The deputies directly attacked with criticism Deputy Minister of Finance Sergei Motorin, who came to the subcommittee meeting: “You yourself say that there are no problems with collecting this tax today and the absence of it in the Tax Code does not prevent anyone from paying it.”
The irritation of the deputies is understandable: by the second reading of the bill, the government introduced about three hundred amendments. To consider them all, as required by the regulations, you will have to spend a lot of time, which the people’s representatives would be happy to use, proving, for example, that the government made many mistakes in the draft Unified Tax and Mineral Tax.
“You come to us with this tax, ask us to work on it, guys, but keep in mind that this chapter of the code will soon be abolished,” said deputy Sergei Shtogrin in his hearts. Sergei Motorin tried to calm the deputy down. According to the Deputy Minister of Finance, the government does not intend to force deputies to do useless work, especially since there is already a precedent for the existence of temporary taxes: the sales tax was once introduced for a limited number of years.
The government's main argument in favor of the need to introduce a temporary water tax is simple: today the state has a lot of problems with non-tax levies (environmental and forestry). The legality of environmental fees, for example, has been repeatedly challenged in court. Therefore, in order to avoid conflicts with taxpayers before the entry into force of the Water Code (which will set payment rates for water use), water fees, according to the government, will be preserved in the Tax Code.
According to the Cabinet of Ministers, deputies will still have enough time during the spring session to adopt this chapter of the Tax Code. At the very least, the government hopes that the more it loads deputies with work, the fewer complaints they will have about the tax package, which the Duma is urgently asking to be finalized in many respects. Irina SKLYAROVA |
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