Serhii Verlanov at a meeting with colleagues from Lithuania and Latvia: “We get ready to reduce the number of audits”
The STS Chairman Serhii Verlanov held a working meeting with the Lithuanian-Latvian delegation headed by the Head of the State Tax Inspectorate of the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Lithuania Yeva Yaunzeme.
During the meeting, the STS Chairman told his foreign colleagues about the formation of the upgraded tax service, its main tasks and priorities.
“The new tax service is already working. Finally, the service is demilitarized. This allows us to build partnerships with the taxpayers. Our main task is to ensure the voluntary payment of taxes. For this purpose we need to develop services, so that the communication with tax authorities will be as comfortable as possible, so that the taxpayer will allegedly forget the way to the tax service.” – noted Serhii Verlanov.
According to him, the audit system will be restarted as well, in particular: the number of audits will be significantly reduced; only risk taxpayers will be checked. An intelligent approach will be used to identify the risks. It is planned that the new changes will increase the percentage of payment up to 40% by audit results.
“Also we need to change our approach to judicial appeal, ie to go to court with “iron” arguments. Then we will be able to fulfill our task - at least 70% of tax cases should be in our favor. High quality of work of the tax lawyers regarding the reduction of number of the tax audits is what we are currently planning.” – emphasized Serhii Verlanov.
Representatives of Lithuanian-Latvian delegation also noted the importance of reducing the number of tax audits. This will allow to focus only at those taxpayers who possess the risk of non-payment of funds to the budget. Representatives of Lithuanian-Latvian delegation work in the tax authorities of Lithuania and Latvia on the basis of this principle. Such choice of priority is an important signal for the tax officials to improve the quality of their work.
Thus, in particular, it was stated that the honest taxpayer should receive all the conditions for his/her activity and undergo any obstacles from the controlling authorities. Instead, dishonest business entities whose activity is detrimental to the budget should be in the spotlight.
Serhii Verlanov also informed the guests about the approved Bills of laws that simplify business operations. In particular, a single tax account, a unified reporting on the personal income tax and a single social contribution for the compulsory state social insurance (only 4 reports will be quarterly out of 16) will be introduced starting from the 1st of January 2020.
Bills of laws on the introduction of the newest RCO that will provide an opportunity to introduce the alternative to classical registrars of calculated operations are pending the President’s signature.
“As of today we face important and difficult period. We are finalizing the formation of the tax service, and competitions for positions of heads of territorial bodies will be announced soon. Herewith, we are getting the new legislative initiatives, laws that we are ready to implement, also we working on digitization, communicating with business and the public in order to become better, as well as keep fulfilling our budgetary tasks. To summarize it is only a month and a half since the start of activity of the new tax service. We have the potential and we are ready for further challenges and tasks.” – emphasized Serhii Verlanov.
