From Russians working from abroad, they were going to withhold an increased tax: who will suffer

Experts told what the authorities are trying to achieve with their decision and how many will be affected by it

A draft law has been submitted to the State Duma obliging domestic companies to levy a 30% personal income tax (PIT) on payments in favor of employees who have gone abroad after they lose their Russian tax residency. The authorities want to apply this measure to those who left the country, but use the Russian segment of the Internet for work or technical software and hardware located in our country. At the same time, the Ministry of Finance clarified that this measure will not affect citizens who have concluded employment contracts.

It is clear that the geopolitical upheavals of the past year have seriously affected the labor market: more than 300,000 people were called up during the mobilization, and another 700,000 citizens emigrated abroad, according to Kremlin estimates. Against this background, the authorities have prepared a bill stating that citizens working abroad for more than six months will have to pay a 30 percent tax. Recall: currently, personal income tax is levied at a rate of 13% for tax residents of Russia with an annual income of less than 5 million rubles and 15% if it exceeds this amount. The same amount should be paid to the state by non-residents working in Russia. All other income of non-resident individuals is taxed at 30%. At the same time, tax residency is lost by an individual who stays outside the territory of Russia for at least 183 calendar days in a row during the year. Thus, for all citizens who went abroad after September 21 and did not return to their homeland, but cooperate with domestic companies, their employers will be required to pay increased tax from next year. But only if they work under oral agreements, as self-employed, under GPC agreements, since the Ministry of Finance explained that the amendments will not affect persons who have entered into employment contracts. For the latter, payments will be taxed at the former rate.

According to Aleksey Zubts, a professor at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, the main goal of the bill is to influence the “poor” people who left, for whom the payment of 30% of the tax will be tangible. But such people, according to expert estimates, are few. “Last year, they talked about 700,000 people who left, about 300,000 of them working, of which 100,000 people have already returned,” the expert explains. – that is, the question of the return of 200 thousand people is at stake. This is approximately equal to the population of a small city in central Russia. These people do not play any serious role for the labor market. This is more of a political signal that Russia needs these people much less than before.”

Talk about the need to put things in order in the taxation of those who left has been going on for a long time, but there were many discrepancies, and now the situation has become clearer. “If amendments are made, then Art. 208 of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation, there will be an unambiguous interpretation of what income will be recognized as received from sources in the Russian Federation, – Anastasia Khrustaleva, Senior Vice President of IC Fontvielle, continues the topic. — Clarity is always better than ambiguity, especially when it comes to the rule of law. But it is obvious that for remote workers this news will entail significant financial losses: and so, due to exchange rates, their income is not stable. It is difficult to predict whether most of the highly skilled workers will return to Russia due to higher taxes, rather, they will look for opportunities to change employers and work for foreign companies, the lawyer believes.

According to the founder of the vvCube consulting group Vadim Tkachenko, the new bill will mainly affect employees of commercial companies, since in the public sector they have either already parted ways or have been banned from working abroad. For the commercial companies themselves, this means an increase in the burden on the payroll and an increase in deductions, and they will also have to control the presence of employees in Russia or abroad so as not to face claims from the tax service. “Non-residents have never really been tracked before,” says Polina Gusyatnikova, senior managing partner at PG Partners law firm. “Now, most likely, the state will track whether a citizen is a resident or not, and, in accordance with this data, charge taxes.” According to the expert, this is not a particular problem: the migration service only needs to transfer data to the tax office. Thus, the Federal Tax Service will have information about who entered and left when and how many days the citizen was outside the Russian Federation, the lawyer explains.