The self -employed fell into collision

Legislators forgot to prescribe the status of their income and set up for bank locks

Tax experts became aware of cases of blocking by banks of accounts of self -employed citizens. The site "Bank.ru" wrote about this on March 21. The head of the Tax Committee of the Moscow Branch of the Russian Federation Sergey Zelenov informed the publication that Sberbank blocked the account of his client from Ryazan. The next day, the Federal Tax Service (Federal Tax Service) advised to send information about their new tax status self-employed to the banks in order to avoid the risk of blocking due to suspicious operations. The service also recalled the possibility of tracking the status of a taxpayer on the FTS website or in an automated database of the API-FNS.

The blocking of accounts of self-employed became possible due to legal conflict. On the one hand, the law allows self -employed citizens to use the account of an individual to receive funds for their services. On the other, it is forbidden to use a personal account for conducting entrepreneurial activity in Russia. The latter and allows banks to block customer accounts with strange activity.

The conflict arose with an increase in the number of registered self -employed Russians. According to the Federal Tax Service in mid -March, their number exceeded 40 thousand people (the law on self -employed, introducing a professional income tax, entered into force on January 1, 2019).

“Until this moment, everything was simple: there was one bill with the entrepreneurial activity regime and the other, a personal account for household, family needs,” explains Olga Pleshanova, head of the analytical service of the Infralelex law firm. –And here the intermediate option turns out. It seems to be a self -employed citizen is not an entrepreneur, but seems to carry out activities that have nothing to do with personal, household needs.

Citizens registered as self -employed, unlike individual entrepreneurs, do not have the right to open an account for individual entrepreneurs. Therefore, income, which the bank classifies as entrepreneurial, receives them at the usual account of an individual.

According to the 23rd article of the Civil Code, people registered as individual entrepreneurs can engage in entrepreneurial activity in Russia-nothing is said about self-employed citizens. At the same time, many services that are self -employed are quite suitable for the definition of entrepreneurship, Olga Pleshanova claims: taxi drivers, repair craftsmen, even tutors, in fact, are the same entrepreneurs. Therefore, any specialist who does not have an employer and employees can move from the status of an IP to the status of a self -employed.

The mechanism of blocking of individuals’s accounts in such a situation is legal: banks are guided by the “anti-laundering” law (115-ФЗ), which counteract the legalization of criminal proceeds and the financing of terrorism. The law establishes a border of 600 thousand rubles, after the crossing of which the bank must report dubious operations in Rosfinmonitoring. At the same time, according to the law on self -employed, their income should not exceed 2.4 million rubles a year, that is, no more than 200 thousand a month.

However, the criteria for evaluating the “doubtfulness” of operations from bank to bank vary, says the lawyer of Ilyashev and Partners Dmitry Konstantinov: “The situation is ambiguous. On the one hand, the fight against the legalization of criminal proceeds should be, and banks play a key role in it. On the other hand, we have embarked on laws that gave banks the right to block everything in a row. ”

The banks themselves do not seek to block the self -employed, the expert emphasizes, it is more profitable for them to save a client with high activity, but with the existing financial monitoring system it is better to play it safe.

It is not so simple to solve the problem with a bank notification of its status, as advises. The fact is that no one obliges the banks to accept the information received, says Konstantinov: “Most likely, the Federal Tax Service had in mind that the bank should still report about the client’s operations so that the service was followed by all taxes.”

At the moment, the relations of the bank and the client are regulated by the Civil Code, and the “anti -laundering” law acts on its own. To resolve such conflicts, it is necessary to eliminate the lacuna and contradictions existing in the legislation, lawyers say.