“The tax service sees everything”: the self-employed regime will be extended to the entire country

From July 2020, the tax regime for the self-employed may be extended from several regions to the entire country, said First Deputy Prime Minister Anton Siluanov, writes Vedomosti with reference to the press service of the Ministry of Finance. Earlier, the Ministry of Finance had suspicions that employers began to use preferential treatment to minimize taxes. Siluanov promises to fight "cunning entrepreneurs" with the help of a special tool of the Federal Tax Service.

What's happened? were discussed Since January, an experiment with the self-employed has been carried out in Moscow, the Moscow region, Tatarstan and the Kaluga region, but in July this regime could be extended to the whole country (recently, only 19 regions ). The experiment was recognized as a success, they say in the Ministry of Finance: the number of entrepreneurs who “came out of the shadows” increased from 40,000 in March to 240,000 people at the beginning of November. According to the RANEPA , there are 16–17 million actually self-employed in Russia.

Risks. In early October, Siluanov complained that enterprises began to transfer their employees to the status of self-employed in order to reduce tax and insurance payments. To combat violations, he proposed limiting the list of professions whose representatives can be registered as self-employed. Whether this measure will be implemented is unclear. But on October 23, on Channel One, Siluanov warned that the Federal Tax Service was developing some kind of special product that would make it possible to see “cunning entrepreneurs” using the self-employed regime for optimization.

Quote: “Instead of their full-time workers, for whom insurance premiums, taxes, etc. are paid, they began to invite the self-employed ... The tax service sees everything,” Siluanov said, adding that such enterprises “are in the tax account.”

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How it works. The self-employed regime provides that a citizen with an income of up to 2.4 million rubles a year, providing paid services and not hiring employees, can pay 4–6% of his income (depending on whether the self-employed person provides services to individuals or legal entities) . The self-employed do not need to pay other insurance premiums, but they need to take care of their future pension on their own - if they wish, they can transfer contributions to the Pension Fund.