Translated material
Cash register
Krasnodar deputies propose to restore the institution of local tax collectors
Special collectors may soon begin collecting taxes from citizens. A bill introducing a special institution of local tax collectors has been submitted to the State Duma. This innovation may give local government a chance to overcome chronic lack of money, but citizens will most likely face further difficulties with paying transport and property taxes.The bill was developed by deputies of the legislative assembly of the Krasnodar region. The authors of the project proceeded from the fact that the acute shortage of financial resources, which almost all local budgets in the country are experiencing, is rooted in the insufficient level of administration of local taxes. The tax base of local taxes itself is extremely narrow and, with the exception of land tax, is based mainly on contributions from citizens. Local budgets receive transport tax, property tax for individuals, a single tax on imputed income and a registration fee for individuals engaged in business activities.
De jure, the institution of tax collectors already existed in Russia. However, de facto it never worked and therefore was abolished on January 1, 2007. The reorganization of the tax administration system carried out in 2007, according to the authors of the bill, only aggravated the situation. Inter-district inspectorates have been created on the territory of the districts, serving two or three districts, each of which consists of about ten settlements, an example is given in the explanatory note. The settlements are located at a considerable distance from each other, which significantly complicates control over the payment of local taxes. The authors of the project are confident that the success of reforming inter-budgetary relations largely depends on the real interest of municipalities in generating the revenue side of local budgets - both through the development of their own tax base and by improving the administration of local taxes. Collectors who collect taxes and monitor the correctness of their payment should, in theory, focus on individuals, for whom territorial tax inspectorates do not have enough time and effort. People pay transport tax with difficulty, and they only remember about property tax when it comes time to sell an apartment, for which a certificate from the tax office is required. The introduction of a new tax collection authority will only aggravate the already quite labor-intensive bureaucratic mechanism for registering both cars and real estate, if registration actions are strictly conditioned by the advance payment of taxes.
Analysts have mixed assessments of the prospects for introducing a new institution.
“When the provision on tax collectors was excluded from the Tax Code, the original text of the amendments did not contain a proposal to exclude the provisions on tax collectors, but, on the contrary, introduced much more detailed regulation of this institution: it established specific rights and obligations of these participants in relations, expanding their powers and even establishing responsibility for non-performance. But these provisions aroused criticism from the State Duma Committee on Budget and Taxes, which pointed out: over the seven years of the existence of the Tax Code, not one of the chapters of the second part of the Tax Code has established a procedure for paying taxes through collectors. As a result, the conclusion suggested itself that this institute is not needed in principle,” recalls Alexey Smirnov, an expert at the Consultant Plus company. The re-inclusion of provisions in the Tax Code, in his opinion, indicates that legislators may consider it possible to begin to use this mechanism. It is possible that it will be tested specifically on the transport tax, entrusting the traffic police-traffic police not only with control over the payment of this tax, but also with the actual collection of the tax, the expert believes. In this case, you will have to pay the tax to the traffic police accounts, and present a receipt when performing registration actions.
Collectors can only be state or municipal executive authorities or officials. “That is, neither organizations (commercial or non-profit) nor individuals should be collectors,” explains Alexey Smirnov. Previously, according to the legislation in force before the adoption of the Tax Code, organizations could also be collectors. This is exactly how the advertising tax from individuals and the parking fee were paid at one time.
Many experts are extremely skeptical about the thesis of the authors of the bill that the introduction of the institution of collectors will help solve the problem of filling local budgets. “We should not forget that in the Tax Code there are still rules that actually regulate the activities of tax and fee collectors. For example, paragraph 4 of Article 58 of the Tax Code establishes a list of persons who can accept tax payments, in addition to banks. These are postal organizations and local administrations. This allows us to conclude that even after the exclusion of this institution from the text of the Tax Code, regardless of the presence of a legislatively established status and the definition of the powers of tax collectors, payment of taxes by the population was carried out without any problems,” believes the head of the accounting and tax consulting department of AKG Intercom-Audit » Andrey Prikhodko.
The draft federal law introduced by Krasnodar legislators, in his opinion, does not solve the problems of tax collectors that existed before the abolition of this institution in NK. This bill, according to the expert, essentially restores only those norms that already existed before, and does not develop and establish new rights and obligations.
“In this regard, a question arises for legislators: was it necessary to abolish this institution in order to include it again in the Tax Code after a year and a half,” the expert sums up.