And you will be cured

The business community is looking for opportunities to reform the unified social tax

Most Russians still have no idea what a full-fledged “social package” is, which in Western countries is necessarily “attached” to wages. In Russia, the entire social and health insurance system is based on the Unified Social Tax (UST), which many enterprises still prefer to minimize. Options for solving the problem of reforming the unified social tax were discussed at the round table “Social insurance reform: interests of business and workers” by representatives of Business Russia and the Coordinating Council of the Association of Employers (KSORR). Businesses are interested in social security, if only because they need rich consumers, entrepreneurs said.

At one time, great hopes were placed on the Unified Social Tax reform, which implied a reduction in the tax rate, as a tool for bringing business out of the shadows. However, despite the fact that the reduced base rate of this tax of 26% has been in effect for more than a year, real success in the fight against shadow wages has not yet been seen. “If 40% of business still operates in the shadows, and millions are handed out monthly in the form of “envelopes,” then this is a sufficient argument for a radical rethinking of the entire social tax system, so that businesses are interested in paying “social” money,” the chairman believes "Business Russia" Boris Titov. Neither medium nor small businesses are interested in this, he believes. Only the largest enterprises (with an income of 280 thousand rubles per month per employee) have access to the regressive scale. The situation can be saved, according to Mr. Titov, only by eliminating the regressive scale and reducing the unified social tax (that is, the burden on the wage fund) to 15% for medium and small enterprises (with a turnover of no more than 1.5 million rubles). “Business Russia” has been trying to lobby for this version of the UST reform for almost a year, although it has not yet received approval from the Ministry of Finance.

The reduction of the unified social tax should be carried out simultaneously with the reform of the entire social insurance system, believes Oleg Eremeev, chairman of the KSORR. The social insurance system serves both the non-working and working population. Therefore, the insurance system for the latter must be adjusted to each specific employee, calculating the tariffs for health and disability insurance, explains Mr. Eremeev. “If funds or even commercial insurance companies receive contributions from employers according to real tariffs, then enterprises will be able to count on adequate compensation from the funds,” Mr. Eremeev believes. While today the maximum compensation from the social insurance fund for sick leave that an enterprise can count on does not exceed 15 thousand rubles. And if at the same time full-fledged medical insurance begins to operate in the country, then an enterprise that provides voluntary medical insurance to its employees will not have to simultaneously make “duplicate” contributions to the Compulsory Medical Insurance Fund, the chairman of the KSORR believes.

The transformation of the social insurance system will not take much time, according to the KSORR. “We are not talking about decades or even years, because the reform of the pension system has already ensured the streamlining of databases about Russians,” says Mr. Eremeev. True, all reasonable innovations proposed as part of the reform of social and health insurance may encounter an absolutely uncalculated factor: all extra-budgetary funds are extremely opaque, and there are a lot of lobbyists who want to leave the current rules of the game in this area as they are now.

Irina SKLYAROVA