The struggle of the economy with arithmetic – Newspaper Kommersant No. 44 (7489) of 03/16/2023

On March 15, Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Sazanov tried to clarify the question of who and how should pay a voluntary contribution to the budget (see Kommersant of February 8). The oil and gas and coal sectors, as well as small businesses, avoided it: “The rest get in, and then whoever has an increase will pay tax, whoever doesn’t, he won’t.” According to the document, sent including to banks, to form a capsule of 300 billion rubles. all organizations with a profit of more than 1 billion rubles are invited.

This is where the certainty ends and the scope for fantasy and mathematical puzzles begins. First, it is not clear for what period the profit is determined. It is logical to assume that the bar should be reached last year, but the calculation formula contains the average profit for 2021-2022, from which the average profit for 2018-2019 is subtracted (skipping the pandemic year 2020). And from the positive difference will be calculated 5% on the contribution. That is, the bar is 1 billion rubles. may relate to the average profit for the previous two years. This assumption looks especially plausible, since the function of officials is to raise money, not to please the bankers. Moreover, Russian banks earned 2.4 trillion rubles in 2021, and less than 200 billion rubles in 2022.

There is one more collision. If we approach the proposed formula from a (albeit absurdly) mathematical point of view, then the losses of Trust Bank (155 billion rubles in 2018) and Dom.RF Bank (90 billion rubles in 2019) could seriously increase contribution of the banking community to the common cause. After all, even a primary school student knows that a minus by a minus gives a plus, and their losses have been added to their profits for the last two years. But since the operation is not so much mathematical as economic, it is logical to assume that the indicator of a loss-making year will most likely be taken as zero.

However, these assumptions do not greatly affect the final result. Moreover, the largest banks – Sberbank and VTB – do not seem to have to make their contribution, since, according to the presented formula, their results in pre-pandemic years are significantly inferior to post-pandemic ones. Even in the toughest scenario, when the losses of 2018-2019 are added to the profits of 2021-2022, the total amount that can be collected from banks does not reach 11 billion rubles. If we consider a more likely calculation option with zeroing the loss, then the contribution will hardly exceed 4 billion rubles, and in the case when the profit cut-off is only for 2022, it will be only 3.5 billion rubles. However, in the same document, bankers were honestly warned that 5% is a preliminary rate. And to ensure the aforementioned collection, it can be changed, and in which direction, it is not difficult to guess.