ИСТИНА

In 2017 the Ministry of Finance of Russian Federation started to discuss the new tax reform: to reduce the rate for compulsory social contributions (i.e. labor tax) from 30% to 22% of total payroll and to increase the VAT rate from 18% to 22%. To date, the reform, nicknamed as “tax maneuver 22/22”, is discussed with business and expert community. The position of the Ministry of Finance is that this reform would improve tax collection, create an important incentive for legal employment, and at the same time would not increase the tax burden on companies (given the declared neutrality of VAT for producers). At the same time, some business representatives and experts argue that the rise of VAT rate would automatically increase consumer prices, increase the tax burden at least on come industries and create the incentive for shadow operations for the certain groups of companies. Some experts add that it would decrease the revenues of the Pension Fund and the other welfare funds in the country. However, the discussion could not get much into detail, as the Ministry of Finance did not disclose yet the numeric estimations – the basis for the proposition of reform, and opportunities for the experts to make the alternative estimations are very limited. In fact, the publicly available estimations on the matter include only some data on budget revenues as the result of “tax maneuver”, and a few estimates on profits and losses for some companies (based on real cases). The present work aims to analyze the impact of the proposed tax reform on industries and budget system. We propose the model for estimation the compulsory social contributions (with a breakdown by industry) based on open data sources. We also argue that VAT in Russian tax code could not be considered fully neutral for the economy, and the increase in VAT would entail unequal additional costs in various sectors of economy. We also attempt to estimate changes in revenues and expenditures of consolidated budget of Russia and find out that reform might bring controversial results either for the budget. Finally, we suggest alternatives to the proposed tax maneuver.