Marriage of convenience

In Russia they don’t know how to write tax bills

Most of the bills prepared for consideration in the State Duma do not meet legal requirements. The Ministry of Justice officially notified this in a press release late last week. Specialists from the Ministry of Justice noted the most violations in tax rulemaking: 90% of documents providing for amendments to the legislation on taxes and fees are rejected by them. Nevertheless, a significant part of this “marriage” is still successfully adopted by legislators.

As reported by the press service of the Ministry of Justice, this year the ministry conducted an examination of 365 bills. For most of them - more precisely, 90% - the department's specialists drew up negative conclusions. Almost all changes concerned the redistribution of budget funds from the federal to regional and local budgets. According to experts from the Department of Economic Legislation of the Ministry of Justice, the main omissions in the draft laws are proposals for the redistribution of income from taxes and fees between budgets of different levels without taking into account the fact that this will entail not only additional cash receipts to a particular budget, but also the transfer of corresponding obligations . The authors of such bills, as the Ministry of Justice assures, usually do not indicate sources of compensation for lost tax revenues from a particular budget.

Among the bills of the outgoing year that lawyers sent to the basket were those in which subjects of legislative initiative proposed the introduction of new taxes or double taxation of certain incomes. For example, a tax on luxury goods introduced by a group of State Duma deputies from the Rodina faction. Even more exotic bills proposed for introduction did not have their own taxation objects at all, such as, for example, the tax on support for motherhood and childhood proposed by the Yaroslavl Regional Duma. Simply put, in their bill, Yaroslavl deputies did not write from whom exactly to collect this tax.

A frequent drawback of draft federal laws providing for amendments to the Tax Code, the Ministry of Justice assures, is the lack of legal grounds and forecasts of the financial, economic, social and other consequences of the adoption of the bill. There are also frequent violations of the rules of legal technology, internal contradictions, and inconsistency with other regulatory legal acts that are subject to regulation of the same legal relations as the proposed bill, explain ministry experts.

However, despite the abundance of legislative defects, low-quality bills have passed and continue to pass all legislative instances. The negative conclusion of the Ministry of Justice, in contrast to the negative conclusion of the legal department of the presidential administration, is not today an absolute “indication” for rejecting the bill. As well as the negative opinion of the government, the prosecutor's office or any other authority. The same thing applies to regional laws and departmental regulations.

Despite the fact that the Ministry of Justice is authorized to send representations to executive authorities on the repeal of legal acts, which must be executed within a month, such warnings often remain without due consequences. Regional regulations, including Moscow ones, are no exception to this, also adopted without regard to the position of the Ministry of Justice.

Irina SKLYAROVA