Overview of tax events for February 2022

Regulatory Developments

The Russian President has signed a law on the specialised regime of the “Automated simplified taxation system”. The adopted law includes a satellite new development whereby Russian companies will be granted an opportunity to become residents of Russian offshore zones.

The State Duma is holding public discussions of governmental draft law No. 47595-8 whereby the tax service has the right to prohibit the disposal of a taxpayer’s property immediately after an audit is scheduled.

Public discussions are being held with respect to the draft law on a unified Russian Pension and Social Insurance Fund being created on the basis of the Russian Pension Fund and Social Insurance Fund. The Russian Ministry of Labour has also proposed that a uniform tariff of social insurance contributions should be introduced (the draft law has been published for discussion).

The Russian Government has obliged foreign legal entities carrying out operations in Russia to provide information on their beneficiaries at the request of the Russian Federal Tax Service and the Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Resolution No. 127 of the Russian Government dated 7 February 2022).

The Russian Ministry of Finance has:

• updated the list of international double taxation treaties between Russia and other countries;

• prepared a taxation scheme for cryptocurrency.

The third package of measures of support for the IT sector may provide tax incentives to market places and aggregators.

Practice

At least 30 new regions should join the implementation of the regional investment standard in 2022. A positive assessment of the implementation of the investment standard will be an “admission ticket” for constituent entities to obtain support, in particular, relating to tax deductions.

The analysis which the tax authorities carried out with respect to the period between 2015 and 2020 has identified violations in 98 field audits out of 100 audits that had been conducted - the difference stems from the fact that adjusted tax returns were voluntarily submitted during the tax audits. After the start of the audit in 2020 alone 1,385 taxpayers with RUB 56 billion of debt started the bankruptcy procedure (or the bankruptcy procedure could not be initiated owing to the lack of property).

Now the Transparent Business service may provide information not only about the address of a company, but also about all entities registered at such address. The resource has also been supplemented with data regarding the founders (members) and managers of companies.

On 28 February the experiment was completed which involved labelling individual types of products containing nicotine - such labelling will become mandatory starting from 1 March.

The Russian Federal Tax Service:

• has announced that RUB 92 billion were repaid in 2021 using settlement agreements and mutual agreement procedures at the stage when bankruptcy procedures were initiated;

• has issued a reminder that its website contains a set of tools for informing about insolvency and bankruptcy risks;

• has prepared an Overview for 2019-2021of court practice regarding disputes relating to the challenging of transactions (letter No.KCh-4-18/18485@ dated 31 December 2021).

• has prepared an overview of legal positions of the Russian Supreme Court concerning the issues of the taxation of property;

• and an overview of court practice regarding disputes relating to the challenging of transactions.

The Russian Supreme Court has published statistics of cases examined in 2021.