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Семинар на тему: "налоговая реформа в россии. Где мы?"

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Поэтому вроде бы улучшение есть, решило ли оно проблему? Нет, не решило. Или, как минимум, далеко не до конца. С НДС вопрос как был, так и остался, потому что там никаких изменений с 2006 года по данному вопросу не произошло. Поэтому для арендатора производить, вот делать отделку самостоятельно продолжает оставаться налогово неэффективным. С точки зрения такого переговорного процесса для арендатора ситуация, может быть, даже немножко ухудшилась, потому что если до 2006 года у арендодателя тоже был некий налоговый риск, связанный с получением данного имущества и потенциальных начислений налогооблагаемого дохода, то с 2006 года законодательство явно исключает из налогооблагаемой базы такие сумму для арендодателя. Поэтому фактически теперь основным заинтересованным лицом в переговорах является арендатор.


Для арендодателя может быть некий вопрос с тем, что безвозмездно полученное имущество он должен будет считать своим основным средством и облагать налогом на имущество, но данный вопрос пока налоговыми органами особо не поднимается, поэтому в общем-то на рынке на него внимания пока тоже особо не обращают. Поэтому фактически на сегодняшний день лицо, заинтересованное в каких бы то ни было изменениях, -- это арендатор.


РЯБОКОБЫЛКО: Причем, рыночная ситуация существенно отличается от того, что мы сейчас с Юлей вам объяснили. Большинство руководителей компаний, которые в принципе принимают решение об аренде в том или ином объекте недвижимости, по-прежнему считают, что они могут амортизировать расходы на отделку прямолинейно на период срока аренды, и многие из них используют это как аргумент того, что стоит подписывать договор определенного срока, потому что это означает вычеты, или, скажем, амортизацию на именно этот срок аренды. В том числе и агенты, большинство агентов, консультирующих в этих сделках, -- тоже оказывается, для многих это сюрприз, что налоговые последствия отделки для самого арендатора гораздо хуже, чем считает сторона, проводящая переговоры. И вопросы возникают именно на этапе, когда договор идет на визирование в налоговый отдел, финансовый отдел либо арендатора, либо арендодателя.


Что мы видим на рынке сегодня, да? В принципе большинство профессиональных игроков, владельцев, готовы обсуждать с вами минимизацию налоговых потерь. И мы здесь хотим сказать о трех наиболее распространенных решениях, которые у этой проблемы существуют. Я добавлю рыночный аспект для проблемы N1, которая касается перевода расходов формально в поле арендодателя. То есть, да, вы как арендатор по-прежнему платите за отделку, но вы это платите путем перевода этих денег арендодателю либо в форме страхового депозита, либо другого платежа, либо повышения арендной ставки, и потом арендодатель нанимает либо своего подрядчика, либо вашего, управляет процессом отделки и передает вам помещение уже в отделанном состоянии по вашему плану, по тому, что нужно было вам построить, фактически является… и тогда, естественно, он принимает к себе на баланс все неотделимые улучшения, связанные с вашей отделкой. Я скажу немножко позже о риске, который арендаторы в этом видят с налоговой точки зрения, да, что ты видишь?


ТИМОНИНА: Ну здесь, наверное, все основное уже сказано. Это действительно один из наиболее таких распространенных способов решения данной проблемы, и он, наверное, такой наиболее радикальный. Альтернативами ему являются такие половинчатые решения, когда либо в договор арендатор и арендодатель включают пункт, в котором говорят, что по окончанию аренды арендатор заберет все улучшения с собой, и поэтому они не являются неотделимыми, что ну на самом деле может быть достаточно спорно с юридической точки зрения, но как минимум это -- некая такая, некая дополнительная страховка. Вот. И другая ситуация, когда арендатор либо не может договориться с арендодателем, либо даже не пытается и просто пытается минимизировать свои налоговые издержки тем, что он получает некое экспертное заключение относительно того, какие из улучшений являются отделимыми и какие неотделимыми, и пытается от эксперта получить как бы максимально выгодное для себя деление между данными двумя типами.


РЯБОКОБЫЛКО: Единственный комментарий здесь, что риск, который видят крупные арендаторы, у которых производятся сложные отделки, -- это банки, это телекомкомпании, у которых есть специальные помещения, в которых делается отделка специальными компаниями, которые лицензированы на эти работы, для таких арендаторов во многом риск управления этим процессом, передача этого управления владельцу здания гораздо выше, чем потенциальные налоговые потери, связанные с тем, что они сами берут на себя производство отделки и оплату за отделку. У нас есть целый ряд примеров, когда в первую очередь банки принимали решение платить, понимая картину с налоговыми последствиями, тем не менее принимали решение платить за отделку, самим и принимать этот налоговый риск на себя.


Так вот, из выводов, наверное, стоит отметить лишь то, что, зная об этой ситуации, если рынок с вашей стороны, с профессиональной стороны, со стороны арендатора, безусловно, со стороны арендодателя как профессиональной стороны, инициирующий процесс development и аренды во многих случаях, если рынок знает о существовании этих налоговых последствий, скорее всего эти налоговые последствия могут быть включены на раннем этапе в ход переговоров, и разумное решение из тех трех, о которых мы говорили, может быть частью переговорного процесса, оно не затруднит завершение сделки на более позднем этапе, если оно возникнет. Поэтому наша рекомендация, основная рекомендация нашего комитета в том, чтобы эти вопросы обсуждались на раннем этапе при ведении сделки по аренде, и обсуждались решения, которые будут возможны для владельца. Некоторые владельцы не будут готовы принимать на себя головную боль, связанную с вашей отделкой, особенно если вы небольшой арендатор. Так что знание об этой ситуации скорее всего поможет минимизировать связанные с отделкой и неотделимыми улучшениями для арендаторов.


ТИМОНИНА: Спасибо.


РЯБОКОБЫЛКО: Спасибо вам большое.


(АПЛОДИСМЕНТЫ)


ГОРЮШИНА: Thank you very much for presenting this topic, which I would assume is interesting and crucial for most of the multinationals operating in Russia. And this was a presentation from the Real Estate Committee of AmCham by Sergei Riabokobylko and Yulia Timonina.


Our next speaker is Alex Chmelev, partner of Baker & McKenzie, and he will be presenting on the topic of dealing with various court-made doctrines, such as good and bad faith taxpayer and recently introduced concept of business purpose.


ХМЕЛЕВ: Thank you, Natalia. My name is Alex Chmelev -- for the translator Aleksander Khmelev in Russian. The topic I am covering is concepts of court-made doctrines, good faith/bad faith taxpayer, and business purpose.


These concepts are not concepts that you can directly find in the Tax Code. These are concepts that have been developed by the courts, and in that sense are an extension of what we see in the legislation. We have seen these concepts used both by the tax authorities and by the courts. By the tax authorities we have seen them used as a very blunt instrument where tax authorities sometimes will simply assert whether it's in act or in court that the taxpayer was simply acting in bad faith, and you are sitting and going, So what?


We have also seen these used by the courts and in some circumstances the courts used these in very egregious fact patterns. In other circumstances it seems that they were more determined to reach particular results with a particular taxpayer, and these doctrines became a good excuse to reach that particular result.


There are some triggers for how these doctrines have developed and usually has been what I would ordinarily call a series of bad facts that came in front of the court, and sometimes bad facts in court decisions can lead to bad results. What is important going forward for taxpayers is to assess the impact on how you do your tax planning and how you handle your tax controversies in the context of these newly made court doctrines.


And for that matter what is important to understand is Russia is not unique. There are quite a lot of other countries that have court made doctrines. Even though their tax systems are codified, you sometimes do find in many jurisdictions where courts will take certain language and they will come up with a new concept, and you are sitting there, looking in the Tax Code and going, I can't find it in the plain language of the statute.


There is a bit of a history on how these doctrines have been made, coming to evolution. So, it's important to understand how they have developed. Back in 1998, if you remember, we had a situation, a financial crisis in Russia, banks were disappearing, taxpayers were making deposits into their banks then instructing their banks to make payments, and somehow before that payment is actually made to the tax inspectorate, to the budget, the bank goes under. So, the court at that time, the Constitutional Court looked at a set of very egregious facts and said, gee, this is unfair, and came up with this notion of a good faith taxpayer. And in some sense that was a nice case.


Of course, as things happened in Russia over the few years, we started to discover that there was quite active trade in this type of bank accounts in the front banks and an aggressive use of these bank accounts for tax payments. Well, again, the Constitutional Court came back, but now this was three years later, in 2001, saw an abuse, saw a patter of bad facts, and started to express a view of treatment of bad faith taxpayers where the previous decisions would not apply.


Then as we kept on moving on and in the cases I have set forth their only intent to be a full scope of all the cases that have decided it's more to give you a flavor of the evolution of the concept. Then we see other decisions, such as a decision in 2003 by the Constitutional Court where the Court had seemed to have been hesitant to fix standards, to set forth fixed standards for what is a good faith and bad faith taxpayer. So, we still don't really understand what constitutes one of these categories. Instead, they decided to leave this for the arbitrage courts, based on the specific facts of a particular case.


We then got a little bit further in 2004. This was, as many of you might remember, our famous VAT decision, where the court looked at a very bad fact pattern, reached the conclusion that a bad faith taxpayer in the absence of payment could not recover VAT. This of course many of you might remember created quite a lot of panic for many businesses because it seemed to have an extraordinarily broad scope.


In a press release that followed upon on this decision in October 2004, the Constitutional Court made a comment clearly stating that its ruling on VAT did not apply to good faith taxpayers. Of course, it's still didn't really tell us what a good faith taxpayer was. We then finally saw that issue resolved by the Supreme Arbitrage Court, again looking at VAT case deciding how to apply this new concept and resolved the VAT issue on the basis of a good versus bad faith taxpayer. In that particular case we happened to have a good faith taxpayer.


As we got into much more recent time, we have seen the presidium of the Supreme Arbitrage Court in 2005 decide that the plain language of the statute of limitations on the imposition of penalties, which was three-year statute of limitations, didn't seem to have any sort of special type of exclusion under any sort of circumstances. We saw the court say, bad faith taxpayer, you don't get full protection of the statute of limitations.


Then in this year we have seen another decision of the presidium of the Supreme Arbitrage Court, looking at notwithstanding formal compliance with Tax Code rules, VAT refund would be denied again. Interesting concept -- bad faith taxpayer. Then we started getting into a situation of well, should there be a predictability of what constitutes a bad faith taxpayer, should there be not? The Supreme Arbitrage Court, starting in 2005 and stretching into this year, has been working on various drafts of an information letter on what constitutes a bad faith taxpayer. The last I am aware of they have done is they basically temporarily packed it in July. It doesn't mean it won't come back into life again or something might not come out of it. It's not a bad idea to understand some of the concepts that we set forth in there.


For purposes of my slides I used a little bit of shorthand to try to shrink down the text of -- the essence of fixed categories that were set forth in the last version of the draft information letter. This one is intended to be per se rules that were in a sense hard and fast rules that are always applied in every single circumstance, but the risk is that whenever rules like these are set forth by the Supreme Arbitrage Court or in the Tax Code or elsewhere, they have a risk of becoming fixed rules that the tax authorities will always say, oh, you have fallen into this category, we are not going to look at anything else, we will apply these rules as they are directly stated, without looking at the specific taxpayer's circumstances.


Among the circumstances that they listed out are taxpayer's accounts that reflect operations that are not possible to be performed based on time and resources economically necessary for the output. The second category is the absence of objective means for that particular business activity. Yet another category is the absence of primary documents confirming operations. And another category is business operations not fully reflected in accounts.


When I looked at these particular categories, it struck me, why do we even need to get into a concept of good faith or bad faith taxpayer? We can deal with this type of issues in instruments that already in existence in the Tax Code. For deductions, for example, we could look not at economically justified or not documentarily supported deductions, and there we have got our particular result for these four particular categories. Or for that matter, in some of these categories we might be able to use the Russian Civil Code provision of sham transaction -- pritvornaya sdelka. That also gets us to that. It's a little bit harder for the tax inspector because the tax inspector doesn't get to just argue bad faith. They actually have, for a sham transaction, to actually say: not only do we believe the transactions the taxpayer purported to have and how they have reported is a sham, but they have to go another step and say how they would re-characterize it and support that re-characterization. So, it's a little bit more difficult for the tax inspector to argue in court.


On the other hand, it also says there is no real rationale to go into this analysis of the existence of bad faith and create this type of per se rules. But there are other provisions that were set forth in the draft information letter of the Supreme Arbitrage Court that I thought were a little bit bizarre. Transactions not favorable to the taxpayer. That's an interesting one. What does that mean? You mean the court and the tax inspector are going to come in, tell the taxpayer, this is how you should be running your business because you didn't do a very good deal. Or transactions with effectively sham counter parties where we have seen this issue pop up is actually fraud on our clients sometimes because our clients sign a contract with somebody, a company has a particular name, then one day as they are working with this counter party, the counter party says, you know, we have switched bank accounts, and can you please pay money into this other bank account. And it turns out that they have set up a separate company with the same name or a very similar name and it happens to be a different legal entry -- odnodnevki -- one-day companies.


Why is an honest taxpayer supposed to be disallowed, let's say, deductions or input VAT simply because they in effect were defrauded by another party? So, it's a little bit of a strange provision, concept for the Supreme Arbitrage Court to put in.


Another one that struck my attention was sale-lease type transactions which do have a lot of underlying commercial basis. Again, it was what can be very frequently a normal transaction was something that the court seemed to have been trying to put into a list of potentially bad faith.


And then finally, they have transactions between affiliated parties or related parties for such things as loans, sale of goods, work/services, for which offsets are used. And then I started thinking through my client list of all my multinationals and, gee, probably most of them do something like that, they pay lots of taxes, they are actually honest taxpayers, but here they are in this listing of potentially thin categories that might be called bad faith.


So, the attempts to formalize our concept of bad faith is maybe not such a good thing. On the one hand, one might argue that it gives a sense of predictability. But when you set forth this kind of rules, they will take on a life of their own. The tax authorities will be using these in a very aggressive form against good taxpayers.


In these draft formulations that the Supreme Arbitrage Court set forth they put in a provision that said the burden of proof to show bad faith is on the tax authorities. But then they go into next sentence saying that the taxpayer must show business purpose. And you look at that language and you kind of wonder which one is it, is it the taxpayer who has the burden or is it the tax inspector who has the burden. And then it has a provision that the courts can inquire on their own initiative. So, that gives the courts rather than a normal scheme of how we were in the courts with the tax authorities set forth their case and the taxpayers' set forth their case, we have maybe a third party: the court deciding whether it wants to pull the line of inquiry in.


And then finally, in the draft the Supreme Arbitrage Court looked at where do we look for the concept of business purpose, how do we find those criteria, essentially looking at reasonable economic purposes and then set forth what purports to be maybe an exhaustive list. And that in terms of competition on the market, preserving or improving regular business activity, existence of circumstances facilitating receipt of economic benefits in the long term, specifics of production and sales of separate types of goods, work, services, and ability to use more optimum means of transfer distribution of goods or services to intermediaries and to final buyers.


Again, this is now getting the courts and the tax authorities looking at the total business affairs, could they run a better business model than the businessman who is running the particular business. And in a fairly recent case of the Federal Arbitrage Court for the Moscow District in June of this year we saw the court directly applying the concept of business purpose when they look at the turnover of tax where the taxpayer had a turnover of its own wechsels that the court concluded had no reasonable business purpose.


Again, maybe that was an extreme fact pattern, but what we have to be worried about is for taxpayers how do you handle the tax authorities taking this type of criteria, accepting that the Supreme Arbitrage Court only has a draft information letter, not a finalized one, where will this start directing towards.


In partial response to what the courts were doing we did see several months ago, before amendments to part one were enacted in July, an attempt to include some concept of good faith taxpayer into the Tax Code. In that draft there was language setting forth the presumption of taxpayers acting in good faith.


And looking at that language, I am not quite comfortable yet that putting some language into the Tax Code and therefore codifying the concept of a good faith taxpayer is necessarily a good thing to do because then it might actually serve to expand that concept and encourage the Supreme Arbitrage Court that maybe it should be finalizing and pursuing its information letter.


The weaknesses of the language that were set forth in the draft language for the Tax Code really said was a good faith taxpayer. So, really didn't give us a sense of what kind of protection does the taxpayer get by putting this language into the Tax Code. I actually think there wasn't any particularly good protection because the court could always point out, well, in our draft information letter we put in this presumption that the tax authorities have to prove bad faith. So, they have made that little checklist. And nobody in that draft provisions set forth what constitutes good or bad faith, and therefore the courts are still fairly free to come up with their own concept.


So, where do we go from here? Or do you do as a taxpayer? Do we now start worrying that we have to take all our tax planning because at the end of the day all our tax planning is directed toward what? Reducing taxes, not increasing taxes. So, the question arises, well, can we do proper tax planning? In general, the view I've taken is that for most taxpayers, where the taxpayers have taken reasonable tax planning positions, are actually paying quite a lot of taxes. To a large extent they are probably safe. We will see some situations where -- and we've seen this in tax litigation, when we've represented clients in court on tax issues -- where everything is going very nicely, the whole decision -- it seems the court is pretty much agreeing with our position, and the tax inspector suddenly realizes they are going to lose the case. So, they have their trump card (…) that they pull out. (…) they raised argument of bad faith taxpayer. And you kind of look -- and what's the basis for the bad faith? Well, the tax inspector can't figure it out at that point because there is no bad faith, at least nothing that they can point out. But the court finally says, ha, we better investigate this issue because the court should be a bit sensitive to this concept of bad faith, at least over the last couple of years. Judges have become a little bit afraid of passing up on what might be a bad faith situation.