United Russia (which voted for raising taxes) advocated easing taxes for business

Raising taxes will not help whiten the economy, so we need to consider reducing taxes for businesses, which were increased this year, said First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Alexander Zhukov at the Sberbank business breakfast at SPIEF.

“All polls show that this decision to raise taxes was too harsh and led to bankruptcy, exit from business, and small and medium-sized businesses going into the shadows. And now the government sets whitewashing the economy as one of its tasks. But ask entrepreneurs: is it possible to whiten the economy by raising taxes? I think the answer 90% will be “no”. Therefore, here, it seems to me, we need to return to this issue and see, perhaps, soften the decisions that we made,” Zhukov said.

Before the start of the business breakfast, its participants and spectators, in a voting format, at the request of German Gref, named the main barriers to business growth. The leader in the room was the cost of borrowed capital (29.5% of responses), and among viewers of the broadcast it was taxes. “Strangled with taxes, it’s impossible to work!” — wrote one of the voters.

Yesterday, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said at the SPIEF macro session that when making decisions to increase taxes, “there were risks that we could go too far somewhere.” “No, we didn’t go too far,” he assured.

In 2026, taxes were increased in Russia once again. Firstly, VAT increased from 20 to 22%. Secondly, the threshold from which a business operating under a simplified taxation system is required to pay VAT has been lowered. Now VAT is paid by all businesses earning more than 20 million rubles in revenue per year (or 1.7 million rubles per month) instead of the previous 60 million.

The bill on the federal budget for 2026, which also included an increase in VAT, was almost unanimously supported by United Russia (only deputy Oksana Dmitrieva voted against it). The party also voted for amendments that lower the threshold for paying VAT under the simplified tax system.