Column by Yuri Barsukov that business will avoid new tax increases

In recent years, September has traditionally become a hectic month for large companies, since the start of active work on the federal budget for the next year always promised problems for them. Since at least 2016, the tax burden on exporters of raw materials in Russia has increased almost continuously, although with periodic targeted relaxations, not excluding the Covid year 2020 and the “special military operation” year 2022.

Although the lion’s share of additional seizures initially fell on oil and gas companies, over time the state extended the practice of unscheduled tax increases to metallurgists, coal miners and fertilizer producers. Taxes sometimes grew without a direct connection with the state of public finances: for example, in 2018 and 2019, the federal budget was executed with a surplus. The conceptual problem was that if there is little money in the budget, then there is little of it, and if there is a lot, there is always something to spend it on.

This year, it seems, the situation is different, and additional tax increases – at least right now – will not happen. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov confirmed on September 11 that the budget deficit at the end of the year will remain within the forecast of 2%, and will not grow, as expected in the summer. The rise in oil prices in the second half of the year, as well as the strong and unexpected weakening of the ruble, coupled with the same economic growth, solved the budget problem even before the Ministry of Finance had to consider new taxes. It turned out to be extremely successful for business that, against the backdrop of a rapidly changing market environment and general uncertainty, the government did not have time, realizing the growing income, to come up with corresponding expenses for them. But one cannot say, looking at the financial results of oil and metallurgists for the first half of the year, that the possibility of increasing taxes has been completely exhausted: the Ministry of Finance in 2016 already successfully implemented the idea of ​​withdrawing “devaluation” profits.

Since the adaptation of the Russian economy to the new life does not yet fit well into any long-term forecasts, the government, despite the general mobilization spirit, is difficult to clearly measure the optimal level of the tax burden, and mostly large businesses manage to “get between the trickles.” However, not everyone – this year private companies, and even very large ones, have to fear not the officials of the Ministry of Finance, but the employees of the Prosecutor General’s Office. In the end, in the worst case, the Ministry of Finance will seize only part of the profit, and according to the claims of the Prosecutor General’s Office, this year the state has already seized dozens of assets. Even the head of the Ministry of Economy, Maxim Reshetnikov, along with many businessmen, began to wonder “where are those red lines,” and the head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Alexander Shokhin, admitted in an interview on September 11 RBCthat “no one here knows who might be next in line.”