Translated material
No loud declarations
The government is not interested in tax amnesty
There are just over two months left before the end of the tax amnesty , and the carelessness of the government, which does not want to popularize this idea, and the confusing explanations of officials of the Ministry of Finance, published on the official website of the department, may completely nullify the liquid flow of voluntary declarants . A letter from the Ministry of Finance, published recently, reminds us that not all citizens’ incomes can be amnestied.In the less than seven months that have passed since the beginning of the tax amnesty, or, as this action is called in the government, “a simplified procedure for declaring income,” neither the federal nor the regional authorities have bothered to seriously popularize this event. No department is responsible for the ideological support of the tax amnesty, although if properly implemented, the income amnesty campaign could become a powerful trump card in the hands of the authorities before the elections, clearly demonstrating the level of current citizens’ trust in the state.
True, in order for the results of the amnesty to be convincing, and for citizens to declare their income en masse, accepting the “rules of the game” announced by the state, it is not enough to announce an amnesty. We need to work on the process: to persuade and convince citizens of the safety and mutual benefit of this procedure. But this is not being done, and September data from the Ministry of Finance indicate that just over 3 billion rubles have been legalized in the country. - this is a drop in the ocean even according to the initial modest calculations of the Ministry of Finance, which considered that the amnesty can be called successful if, at its end, about 8 billion rubles are legalized.
The feeling that the amnesty is being carried out only to motivate tightening of tax control is growing. Adding to the confusion are explanations from regional officials from the departments of the Federal Tax Service and the Federal Treasury. In an effort to explain that simplified declaration is an extremely simple procedure, just come to the bank and pay a 13 percent declaration payment, officials themselves often confuse the rules of the law. Somewhere in the regions they write in official press releases that “an individual independently determines the amount of income on which taxes and insurance premiums have not previously been paid,” somewhere they indicate that “the payer needs to determine the amount of profit that they want to declare , calculate 13% from it and deposit this amount into the bank, indicating that this is a “declaration payment”. Seeing that local officials are asking citizens to report on unpaid taxes in general, and on “profits”, and on arrears, the Ministry of Finance issued its clarification. Obviously, explaining that the above statements correspond only to the spirit of the law on simplified declaration, but not to the letter.
As the Ministry of Finance indicated in a rather vague letter No. 03-01-11/2-59 signed by the Deputy Director of the Department of Tax and Customs Tariff Policy Sergei Razgulin, citizens can declare in a simplified manner all income, including those that they received from entrepreneurial activity. At the same time, the letter reminds that the law on the simplified declaration procedure applies only to income that was subject to income tax.
From such a structure it is impossible to obtain a clear answer to a simple question: “all” or “not all” legally received income can be amnestied. Meanwhile, when the idea of a tax amnesty just began to be discussed, the only restriction on the legalization of income was its criminal origin, and all other income received was allowed to be amnestied. The current verbal casuistry around the tax amnesty only adds to citizens' confidence that disclosure of income will cause further persecution by tax and law enforcement agencies.