The Ministry of Finance is preparing to introduce liability for failure to provide information about goods subject to traceability

The Ministry of Finance has returned to work on a delayed draft of introducing liability for violations when submitting documents and data on transactions with imported goods subject to traceability to the tax authorities, in particular, refrigerators, washing machines and baby carriages. It is planned to introduce it from January 1, 2024 – we are talking about fines of up to 100 thousand rubles, but with the possibility of avoiding punishment when correcting documents. The business community believes that such violations should not be immediately punishable by large fines, and propose to differentiate them.

The Ministry of Finance returned to the idea of ​​introducing liability for violations when submitting documents on transactions with goods subject to traceability – the department published a draft amendment to the Code of Administrative Offenses. Recall that the national traceability system has been in effect since July 1, 2021 and involves the collection of information about certain groups of imported goods (in particular, refrigerators, washing machines, baby strollers and car seats, bulldozers and excavators) to monitor operations with them – this was done to combat counterfeit and smuggling.

To ensure such monitoring, a business must switch to electronic document management, as well as submit reports and documents containing traceability details to the tax authorities – they allow you to identify consignments of goods and track their “history”. It was originally planned that liability for non-compliance with these requirements would appear from July 1, 2022 (after the end of the transition period), but last year the Federal Tax Service and the Ministry of Finance proposed to postpone its introduction until January 1, 2024. This decision was explained as a measure to support business and increase the stability of the economy, and was probably associated with the restructuring of logistics and commodity chains. The government agreed with this and transferred the document to the plan of legislative activity for 2023.

According to the project, fines for failure to submit reports on transactions with “traceable” goods, failure to reflect or distort details in invoices and universal transfer documents for individual entrepreneurs will range from 1 thousand to 30 thousand rubles, and for legal entities – up to 100 thousand rubles. Similar fines are also imposed for violating the procedure for issuing invoices containing traceability details in electronic form. Responsibility for the submission of incorrect data can be avoided if they are corrected before the tax authorities request documents during a desk audit. The draft also provides for the introduction, from July 1, 2024, of liability for operators of electronic document management for failure to submit or late submission to the tax authorities of invoices and universal transfer documents received by them: for the first time in the form of a fine of 50 thousand rubles, and then already in the range 100–150 thousand rubles

As the Ministry of Finance explains, the lack of responsibility for such violations does not allow the collection of reliable data on the chains of movement of goods. According to the Ministry of Finance, the system covers about 357 thousand organizations and individual entrepreneurs, however, at the end of 2022, only 280 thousand market participants reflected traceability details in documents submitted to the tax authorities, and 226 thousand discrepancies were identified in documents with the necessary details.

Denis Domashnev, responsible secretary of the Delovaya Rossiya expert center for control and supervision activities, notes that traceability of goods is a kind of analogue of the permanent control regime, which allows minimizing on-site inspections, but its implementation was “fraught with certain difficulties, technical nuances and costly from business.” In his opinion, errors in the transmission of data and untimely transmission of information to the traceability system should not immediately be punished with large fines and it is worth introducing a gradation depending on the frequency of violations.

Evgenia Kryuchkova