The Federal Tax Service prescribed a sedative – Newspaper Kommersant No. 17 (7462) dated 01/31/2023

The tax authorities will not collect debt in the form of a negative balance on the recently introduced single tax accounts (UNS) before conducting individual reconciliations with the taxpayer. The letter issued by the Federal Tax Service explains that such “manual” reconciliations after the entrepreneur contacts the service will take place until March 1 of this year. A “moratorium” on collection has been announced to eliminate conflicts that are possible in connection with the transition to a new tax payment procedure – the intermediate results of the balance formation that had previously appeared in personal accounts caused concern among a part of the business.

As part of the transition to a single tax account, which now forms the balance of accruals and payments of the taxpayer, the tax authorities will not apply enforcement measures in relation to the negative balance and penalties on payments for periods until 2023. As follows from the letter of the head of the Federal Tax Service, Daniil Yegorov, published on the agency’s website, this procedure will be in effect until individual reconciliations of data between inspections and entrepreneurs are carried out. Such “analysis” will be carried out until March 1 – for this, according to the Federal Tax Service, entrepreneurs must apply to the tax authorities themselves, declaring their disagreement with the formed balance.

Recall that from January 1, tax payments to budgets are transferred to a single account in the treasury, indicating only the amount and TIN of the payer. The tax authorities themselves distribute them on account of the payment of all due taxes. This procedure was introduced to simplify payments and exclude cases when entrepreneurs simultaneously had both debts and overpayments for various types of taxes (see Kommersant dated June 29, 2022). In total, according to the Federal Tax Service, the new mechanism covers 72.7 million taxpayers.

The “moratorium” on collection established by the letter is obviously related, among other things, to the fact that in the past few weeks the business has reported cases of displaying “sudden” debts in the personal accounts of taxpayers. The Federal Tax Service explained this by the fact that in a number of cases the process of forming the final balance had not yet been completed at the time of checking personal accounts, in connection with which some taxpayers saw, as it was said, “preliminary irrelevant data.”

The measure now announced mainly concerns persons who have made mistakes – it is assumed that reconciliations will make it possible to eliminate conflicts associated with the introduction of the new system. It should be noted that it was the mass character of errors in filling out payment documents that was called one of the reasons for the transition to the UNS – there were about 80 million of them per year.

Daniil Yegorov’s letter also informs that until May 1 and until the end of the declaration campaign for certain taxes and fees, payers will not be held liable for failure to submit notifications of calculated taxes, fees and contributions for periods up to 2023, as well as for understating the tax base ( if it has not been verified).

The head of the De Jure law office, Nikita Filippov, notes that the ENS itself greatly simplifies calculations, but its implementation “faced a harsh reality – the system still needs to be adjusted, checked and corrected.” The managing partner of Kaminskiy, Stepanov & Partners, Vladislav Kaminsky, agrees with this: “The system was not quite ready for the introduction of the UNS, and many of our clients have already complained about the “unreasonable” negative account balance.” However, he emphasizes, the human factor is also to blame for the current situation. “All tax consultants, as one, advised taxpayers in 2022 to reconcile calculations and revise unfulfilled requirements and decisions, but far from all did this,” the expert notes.

Such transition difficulties, Ilya Zharsky, managing partner of the Veta Expert Group, believes, may lead to an increase in litigation, and therefore the step taken by the Federal Tax Service towards business looks quite logical and “meeting the interests of both taxpayers and tax authorities.” As Nikita Filippov adds, this will allow the tax authorities to exclude most of the unfounded claims related to the formation of the balance. In addition, he recalls that, according to the current rules, if after January 1 a taxpayer is sent claims for the payment of taxes or decisions on the collection of debts, then the earlier analogues cease to be valid – until the sending of new ones they remain in force. In this regard, he believes, the letter of the Federal Tax Service on non-bringing to tax liability during the transition period is intended to reassure taxpayers.

Evgenia Kryuchkova