Tax administration reform leads to revocation of business trip certificates

The Federal Tax Service (FTS RF) together with the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation has prepared a “roadmap” “Improvement in tax administration”, which is going to be implemented in 2014.

Today in the century of information and communication technology development certain forms of tax reporting seem to be surplus. By 2018 revocation and simplification of some of them will lead to significant cutting of preparation time. Still, the situation is far from perfect. Thus, according to rating “Conduct of business”, annually published by the World Bank, Russia has taken 56 place in 2013, having improved its position on 8 places per year. The rating estimates the countries by three components: total tax rate, amount of payments and time, spent on calculation and payment of tax.

The roadmap was made in order to ease the so-called “administrative barriers” for conducting of business. It includes the next main points, proposed for consideration and passage of it legislatively:

• disclosure of tax correlation; earlier these documents were internal in the FNS, now they will be published in open access;
• creation of a single shipping document, which will unite invoice and other documents, revocation of surplus reporting forms, including business trip certificates as late as 2014;
• change of rules for maintaining accounting records will be published for at least 6 months before the date of entry into force. If it is published at a later time, the deadline of declaration should be extended;
• organization of preliminary tax explanation (tax consulting) institution in the country;
• extension of terms of filing accounts up to 5 days, for electronic report – up to 10;
• reduction in number of required fields for transfer of taxes and charges;
• permission for employers with payments of social security benefits and leave allowances to be responsible for paying of the income tax simultaneously according to paid sum of benefits and leave allowances during a month;
• exclusion of duplicative requests of the tax account, being furnished to taxmen earlier;
• conducting as many as possible operations in electronic form in the course of cooperation of the tax authorities and taxpayers.

If corresponding initiative finds government support, then implementation of the roadmap will surely be a positive signal for business and it will finally improve investment climate in the country.