Page 53 - RusRPTMay19

6.1.1 Budget dynamics - specific issues...
Russia’s tax burden will not grow in the next six years, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told the State Duma, parliament’s lower chamber, on April 17. “We have made a principal decision: not to raise the tax burden for the next six years,” Medvedev said. He also said that the amount of business requirements must decrease several times. “The entrepreneur must understand what we want him to do. Our goal is to relieve business from excessive and at times senseless requirements. There are thousands of documents, sometimes they double or contradict each other,” he said. Russia must continue decriminalization of economic violations so that arrest becomes a rare punishment, Medvedev said.
The Federal Tax Service (FTS) has reformed its system of inspections to better detect tax evasion schemes that are widespread within an industry. Tax experts think the FTS’ new system will do precisely what it is intended to: it will help authorities better understand business’ strategies to evade taxes and enable them to collect taxes more strictly. As one tax adviser at PwC put it, if businesses think their schemes will not be exposed under this new system, they are naïve. This is important as the government attempts to simultaneously run budget surpluses and execute the 26-trillion-ruble national projects in the coming years. Businesses, of course, have a few concerns. They don’t like the idea that tax authorities will view an entire industry suspiciously after
53 RUSSIA Country Report May 2019 www.intellinews.com