Auditors say nontax payments in Russia exceed 1.5 tln rbl in 2018

MOSCOW, Aug 30 (PRIME) -- Russia’s Audit Chamber has suggested that the Finance Ministry recalculate existing nontax payments to the budget, the sum of which exceeded 1.5 trillion rubles in 2018, the authority said in a statement on Friday.

“As of today, this or that form of these accounts for two thirds of all budget revenue sources, while the sum exceeded 1.5 trillion rubles in 2018. Analysis of the Audit Chamber showed that 5,479 articles of the register of federal revenue sources can be considered nontax payments,” the authority said.

Excluding fines, subsidies and subventions, rental payments, and some other types of nontax payments, the Audit Chamber’s analysis shows about 60 types of payments or 262 mandatory payments left at the federal level.

“We saw that 93 of them are located in different Codes, with 61 of them included into the Civil Code, seven of them into the Water Code and so on, while 163 more payments are included in federal laws. In general, the analysis allows us to say that there are no laws that do not oblige us to pay,” the Audit Chamber said quoting Auditor Sergei Shtogrin.

The government has been working on reduction of nontax payments since 2015, and the Finance Ministry has already wrote a bill to include environmental, utilization, and resort fees and payments in the Tax Code. But auditors say the decision is inconsistent.

“The oversight authority thinks that the ministry should set up an inventory check of existing mandatory payments in order to optimize them, while the government should set the terms and the order of the check, as well as the criteria for mandatory nontax payments,” the statement read.

(66.7471 rubles – U.S. $1)

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