EXCESS PROFIT TAX : EXPECTATION AND REALITY

The draft law No. 379248-8 was prepared by the Government of the Russian Federation and submitted to the lower house of the Russian Parliament. As follows from the explanatory note to the document, it is proposed to establish for organizations whose average arithmetic profit for 2021 and profit for 2022 turned out to be above 1 billion rubles, a tax on excess profits, determining that the tax base for this tax is calculated as an increase in the average arithmetic profit for 2021 and profit for 2022 above the arithmetic mean of profit for 2018 and profit for 2019, and the tax rate is set at 10 percent.

It is worth noting that in the case of the actual transfer in 2023 of a certain amount of money (security payment) to the federal budget, the amount of tax, in fact, may be equal to the amount calculated at the rate of 5 percent, and these transferred funds will be offset against the payment of excess profit tax. In addition, the excess profit tax will be credited exclusively to the federal budget and will be of a one-time nature.

The draft law also establishes a number of exemptions, according to which certain organizations, for example, from the oil industry, will not be among the payers of the Russian windfall tax.

Currently, the bill is being prepared for the 1st reading procedure, the decision of the relevant committee has set a deadline for submitting feedback and proposals until June 28, 2023, that is, the legislator intends to hold the bill through at least 1 review, which indicates interest in its rapid adoption.

At the same time, representatives of the business community and a number of departments still have objections to the need to introduce an emergency tax, at least in the form in which it is currently presented.

In addition, some sources observe the presence of certain procedural inconsistencies in the process of adopting this bill.

In particular, one of such problems is an attempt to circumvent the ban on the introduction of a new tax established by law before the expiration of the current calendar year – the bill contains a reference to the not yet adopted norm of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation, which will allow the introduction of emergency taxes by the end of this year, that is, several bills will be considered by the State Duma.

A separate hint that this is how the procedure will take place is contained in the projected norm, according to which, when paying the excess profit tax before November 30, 2023, it will be possible to get a discount, that is, before the specified date, as one can assume, the law will already come into force.

According to the annexes to the text of the bill, the expected budget revenues due to the introduction of the new tax will amount to about 300 billion rubles.

Of course, this figure is obtained by calculations. However, it is worth noting that the experience of introducing an emergency tax in other countries suggests that planned revenues, as a rule, are not achieved.

It is too early to talk about any potential effect of the future law, since it has not even passed the procedure of reading 1 yet, that is, certain adjustments may still take place during the procedure of its consideration. However, the general concept is that there should be a tax on excess profits, and other extraordinary taxes may follow (the above–mentioned projected norm of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation allows you to introduce "taxes", not "tax").

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