Overview of tax events for January 2021

Regulatory Developments

The State Duma (the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament) has adopted a law amending the Tax Code to specify the procedure for determining prices for taxation and tax control when transfer pricing agreements are entered into. In addition, the storage period for taxation documents has been increased from four to five years. An obligation for banks has been introduced to provide the tax authorities with documents available to them. .

The Russian Ministry of Finance has:

• proposed to improve the taxation regime in Special Administrative Districts;
• sent to the Russian Government a draft resolution to extend the experiment with respect to the traceability of products until 30 June 2021.

The General of the Investigative Committee of Russia is proposing to enshrine in the Criminal Procedure Code a provision on keeping property under seizure when a sentence is imposed and the injured party is entitled to file a lawsuit within the framework of civil proceedings. And it is advocating the strengthening of criminal liability for. One further initiative is to immediately send files from the tax authorities to the investigator.

Practice

The Russian Ministry of Finance has published an Information message that the Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Related Measures to Prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting has started to apply. And the Ministry has the list of 34 countries with which agreements have been reached to revise double taxation treaties.

The Russian Federal Tax Service:

• is creating a special inspectorate whose the clients will be persons whose annual income exceeds RUB 500 000 000;
• has started to request from producers a quarterly forecast of the change in prices for goods of social significance until the end of the year;
• with support from the Russian Ministry of Finance has developed a unified electronic system for the monitoring of tax expenses of the state budget;
• has extended the search and view features of necessary information in the Transparent Business service.

The experiment with returning VAT to foreigners when they export goods purchased in Russia outside the EAEU's territory (tax-free) has been extended until 31 December 2021.

The Federal Customs Service has published an Overview of the consideration of appeals against decisions and actions or omissions of the customs authorities and its officers in the area of customs for 2020.