The Accounts Chamber proposed to improve the planning system for field inspections of the Federal Tax Service

The system of risk criteria used by the Federal Tax Service (FTS) of Russia when planning field tax audits (VNP) needs to be improved. This conclusion was reached by the Accounts Chamber following the analysis of the GNP in 2019-2021. Research materials leads TASS.

Auditor of the Accounts Chamber Andrey Baturkin told the agency that since 2007 the Federal Tax Service has been applying a risk-based approach in planning and assigning GNP. Nevertheless, in 2019–2021, an increase in the share of unsuccessful inspections of organizations was recorded. According to Mr. Baturkin, the figure increased from 4.8% in 2019 to 5.4% in 2021.

“The average duration of GNP also does not tend to decrease. At the same time, the number of taxpayers subject to GNP is decreasing, from 8,167 in 2019 to 7,167 in 2021,” the auditor noted.

Andrei Baturkin clarified that one of the key factors in the effectiveness of the GNP is the quality of the pre-audit analysis of taxpayers. However, since 2019, the obligation of the tax authorities to monitor performance has not been regulated, which means that the tax authorities have no unified approaches to its implementation.

At present, according to the auditor, monitoring of the quality of the pre-audit analysis is carried out in less than half of the regional departments of the Federal Tax Service. At the same time, in the analysis of the Accounts Chamber, there are significant discrepancies between the planned indicators and the actual results of on-site inspections. “So, in 62% of cases, the results of the pre-test analysis were higher than the results of GNP, in 35% of cases they were lower, and only in 0.5% of cases they were comparable,” said Mr. Baturkin.

In addition, during the pre-audit analysis, a sufficiently large amount of documents is requested, as a result of which an additional administrative burden is created on the business, the auditor pointed out. According to him, in preparation for conducting 500 GNPs, about 10,000 requests for more than 124,000 documents were sent as part of this analysis alone. At the same time, in 45.2% of cases, according to the results of the analysis, taxpayers are not included in the GNP plan due to non-confirmation of the risks on the basis of which they were selected.

Milena Kostereva