| The Ministry of Internal Affairs announces an increase in arrests for tax crimes Despite all the attempts of the Cabinet of Ministers to optimize tax administration by establishing clear criteria for what is permitted for fiscal officials, the main scare of taxpayers remains in the legislation: articles of the Criminal Code punishing with imprisonment for up to five years for tax evasion or concealment of property from which they are collected. But it seems that this is not enough for the security forces: the Ministry of Internal Affairs believes that changes must be made to the articles of the Criminal Code that provide for liability for tax offenses to tighten the liability of payers.
As Deputy Head of the Legal Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia Ilya Kucherov said yesterday at the business forum “Tax Crimes: Limits of Liability”, in 2004 about 7 thousand people were brought to criminal liability for tax crimes, in 2000 the tax police brought 40 thousand to trial . cases per year. Mr. Kucherov associates the decline in indicators with administrative reform. “It has now been completed, and we hope to soon reach previous levels,” he said.
Tax crimes, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, caused damage to the budget of 75 billion rubles last year. (for comparison: all other economic crimes - 40 billion rubles), while only 8 billion rubles were reimbursed to the budget from this amount. It is curious that tax crimes are investigated the worst in St. Petersburg. Deputy Head of the Investigative Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Boris Gavrilov laments: “About 250 such offenses were uncovered in Moscow and the Moscow region, but in St. Petersburg, to our great shame, only two cases were investigated last year.” In total, 2.8 thousand cases of tax evasion by individuals, 3.5 thousand by organizations, and 360 by tax agents who failed to fulfill their obligations were recorded throughout the country last year. 1.1 thousand facts of concealment of property were also revealed.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs proposes to combat “black” wages with tough measures such as introducing additional liability for tax agents into Article 199.2 of the Criminal Code. That is, the accounting departments of enterprises are obliged to transmit information about employees’ salaries to the fiscal authorities and transfer their 13 percent income tax. According to the deputy head of the legal department of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ilya Kucherov, not only failure to fulfill such duties in personal interests, but also in favor of other persons will be considered a crime. Thus, a chief accountant who has not completed and submitted a calculation for personal income tax in the “interests of the taxpayer” may face a fine of 100-300 thousand rubles. or imprisonment for up to two years.
The so-called problem of “three financial years” may be excluded from the Criminal Code. Now the fact of tax evasion on a large scale is proven based on the indicators of three financial years, but whether these years should go one after another or they can be “pulled” from the previous ten years, the Criminal Code does not give an explanation. According to Mr. Kucherov, this term, due to its inaccuracy, should be excluded. However, the lack of a specific time frame may give inspectors new grounds for applying sanctions, since the statute of limitations for criminal articles is ten years.
The preparation of these amendments is carried out as part of a program to improve tax administration, Mr. Kucherov said. And for some reason he suddenly added: “In China, illegal VAT refunds are punishable by death, but this method is not applicable to Russian taxpayers.”
But, according to experts, it is incorrect to talk not only about tightening, but in general about the existence of any criminal liability for tax crimes on the part of the state. According to the chairman of the expert council of the State Duma Committee on Budget and Taxes, Mikhail Orlov, over the past five years, 66 laws have been adopted that complement the unclear concepts of the Tax Code, 29 of them were adopted last year. “If the Ministry of Finance published new income tax returns eight days after the reporting deadline, millions of taxpayers immediately became criminals,” Mr. Orlov said. But government officials get away with it all. According to Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Budget Committee Andrei Makarov, the problem is not even that it is necessary to amend tax or criminal legislation to protect the payer. It’s just that today it is considered normal that the state constantly keeps all taxpayers on the hook for criminal prosecution. Irina SKLYAROVA |
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