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

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What he did had two elements to it. The housing exclusion. If before you could exclude everything in excess of that base amount, now you can only exclude the first $11,536 in excess of that base amount. And I think everyone here knows the housing market in Moscow and you know what expatriates are sometimes having to pay. They very quickly spend $11,536 in rent and there are cases when not only they are doing that well before the end of the year, they are doing that even before January 31. So, not so reasonable.

The other thing is that there is an acceleration in the application of the US marginal rates to non-excluded income in the US. We do have progressive rates in the US unlike Russia where they are flat. And I will illustrate why that happens shortly. And the result, massive additional cost to US expatriates and companies in Russia and around the world. Again, a wild guess. I've heard that this will offset the lost revenue on the first point only to the tune of about $3 billion. So it's actually not that significant in the context of lost revenue on the first point, but $3 billion is still a lot of money. Another wild guess is that, I would say, at least tens of millions of that will relate to the US expatriates and businesses in Russia. So it is a significant impact that we are looking at.

Okay, this is just to help you visualize what I've described in words. The first element, the limitation of the housing exclusion: $50,000, let's just take that as an example, assuming someone pays $50,000 in rent. If before, everything in the purplish red, that could be excluded above the $11,894, now you can see it's only the first $11,563. Everything above that is still included in taxable income. This shows you for $50,000 -- again, for a lot of expatriates those bars go a lot higher and you can extrapolate that.

Here is the graphic display of why there is an acceleration in the application of the marginal rates of tax. Whatever you exclude between the basic foreign earned income exclusion plus the housing exclusion, it used to be the case that that came off the top of your income. Okay, what you see to the left. Going forward, naturally, retroactively to the beginning of 2006, because these changes are effective retroactively to January 1, 2006, that will come off at the bottom and so you can see that the applicability of those rates starts earlier.

Now, we've done the map on this. The curve goes up but it plateaus. The wealthiest taxpayers are the taxpayers who are in the top 35 percent tax bracket in the US, realize a tax increase of roughly $17,000 from this change.

From housing -- it depends on your housing costs --

РЕПЛИКА: (…)

РЕЙНХАРД: Without any regard to housing, just on this change alone, $17,000. You have to add to that the additional tax cost from the housing change and that will depend specifically on how much your spending on housing and which tax bracket you are in in the US. But for most expatriates this will be a far more expensive change than this one.

Graphically, I will show very briefly now. Five examples, five income levels ranging from $75,000 to $1 million. That's total income, salary, housing allowances, any other expatriate allowances, tax reimbursements, total package, assuming there is five levels, of which assumed those amounts are being paid upon rent.

A few other reasonable assumptions have gone into these calculations. What's the impact? Well, Americans were already at a disadvantage compared to non-Americans before. This shows you how bad has gone to worse. At each of those income levels you can see in the blue how much the typical non-American working in Russia, the European national is going to be paying in taxes at those levels of income, and that's just the 13 percent Russian tax. The purple, again, is how much Americans had to pay before at the same income levels. The yellow is how much worse it is in 2006 under these law changes.

When you go over to $75,000, there is no change. So, if you are in that category, the good news is that you have no change in the tax liability. The burden is, as you know, $1 million (?).

This just displays it another way. Most non-Americans, if you take that at the base line, then you can see the percentage, you know, how much more in total tax Americans have to pay in percentage terms relative to most non-Americans under old rules and again under new rules. So someone making a million dollars, the top blue line, if before they had to pay roughly 110 percent more than the British guy or the Russian guy, now it will be more like 145 percent more.

This is in absolute terms, how much more each of those individuals will have to pay in US tax and therefore in overall tax. The more interesting way to display that data, I think, is on this one, which shows you in percentage terms how much more people are going to have to be paying. And you can see it hits hardest at the middle, $300,000, and I can tell you that is pretty typical for a midlevel US expatriate at a US multinational company. When you add in the salary, the bonus, the housing, cost of hardship, other things that get in there, you very quickly get to $300,000 for a midlevel expatriate. 50 percent increase and how much they are going to pay in tax in 2006 compared to 2005, buying any relief coming through.

One final point before I turn it over to Andrew to talk a little bit of what the Chamber has been doing to address this issue. If we go back to those two elements of change, on the housing it says that the Department of Treasury, the Secretary of the Treasury can single-handedly raise that limit for any given country, based on housing data available to him that indicates they are to be increased.

On this one, that's the acceleration in the marginal tax rates. He cannot do anything about that. That's embedded in the law. So, unless there is another law changing the Tax Code again, that's here to stay.

So, with that I'll turn it over to Andrew to talk about some of the work that's been going on since June to try to help you on this issue.

СОМЕРС: Thank you, Peter. Thank you for taking the bad news part. I don't have good news yet, but we are trying to move that way. Peter closed his remarks by pointing out that one aspect of this onerous tax bill, the housing exclusion limit is subject to discretion of the Secretary of Treasury to grant relief to jurisdictions where the impact of this housing exclusion rule will be particularly unfair and onerous.

Now, AmCham Russia moved very quickly after this tax bill was signed by President Bush. The first thing I did was to call Peter Reinhardt whom I always call when AmCham has a tax, a real serious tax problem because Peter's track record of moving quickly in with tremendous skill is one that's very well known to me in my five years here. And also Sergei Riabokobylko on the housing side of the equation, and then very quickly put together, with the help of other tax and real estate experts, a document to support a request to the Secretary of Treasury for relief for expats in Russia, American expats in Russia. And the dossier is comprised partly of the kind of information that Peter gave you on the tax side, the impact on US taxpayers in Russia at various levels of income and also the real estate market here in Russia for residences, the trends which continue to go up. And together it makes a very powerful factual case to the Treasury.

And in the middle of June I went to the US primarily for this purpose to make the presentation to the Treasury Department. We moved so fast, at the day I arrived the current Secretary Hank Paulson was still not the Secretary, he was actually in the Senate chambers being questioned by the Senate as part of his confirmation hearing proceeding. He was confirmed the next day. I met with the Assistant Secretary responsible for international tax in his tax council. We spent about an hour talking about the concepts. They were very pleased to get this analysis. We were told that AmCham Russia was the first organization worldwide not only to make a request for relief but actually provide a substantial analysis of why this relief should be granted. They were very grateful to get that and we are very happy to get this thing moving quickly.

One point that we discussed was the type of relief. The Treasury has various ways to grant this discretion. They could look at the entire universe, all the countries around the world, where expats are working, look at the housing market and come up with a kind of an average number by which they might raise the housing ceiling.

The other way which actually the Treasury Department at the time I spoke with them suggested might be the best way, and that would be for us, is to look at each jurisdiction. That week that I met with Treasury, one of the most credible and famous international statistical analysis corporations came out with the startling news that Moscow, Russia, has the highest residence rates in the entire world. Now this was a very good timing. I cannot take credit for that but I was able to use it at this meeting and the treasury said that probably the best way they would go would be to look at each jurisdiction and to figure out a solution. And since Moscow has got the highest rate of US expats would benefit from probably the highest or the most positive type of solution rather than another solution.

Since that time, we have had reports from treasury and the IRS that the housing exclusion issue is top priority. We know that the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington has been gathering information from different AmChams around the world on the paying that will be incurred by expats, and in late August I wrote to the Secretary himself, pointed out the meeting that I had in late July, the dossier that we have presented. And yesterday our Washington representative, the Washington representative of AmCham Russia, Ambassador Robinson visited with the Treasury's office. He himself has been traveling in Asia, as you may know, in the past two weeks. And his office confirmed that the letter had arrived and had been distributed to the key people and that he would see the letter again on Monday.

So, I think our timing is very good particularly as the IRS has indicated they are looking at a fair solution and now will remind the Secretary, if he needs any reminding, that this is a very hard issue for Americans working around the world, particularly Americans working in Russia, who will probably be the hardest hit of any expats around the world.

I am sure this is not an anti-Russian policy of the US. It's just the way it works because of the high residence rates and actually the low income tax rate here. We hope to get some news, positive news, hopefully, in September, possibly. More likely in October and we will keep you posted on that.

The second aspect of the bill which, as Peter pointed out, we can do nothing about right now is the change in the effective tax rate that Peter took you through. However, during the same week I was in Washington, I visited with Senator DeMint. He is the Senator from South Carolina. And he has prepared a bill from the Senate -- which has not passed the Senate yet. It's a proposal -- to basically eliminate double taxation for American expats around the world. Not simply to go back to the relatively good world of today in terms of how expats are hurt, American expats. And as Peter pointed out, that's not so great, that expats, Americans pay about 110 percent more tax than their European counterparts today.

Senator DeMint would wipe that whole thing out and say: look, now how can we base this on some kind of exclusion? We are simply going to tax Americans on income earned in the United States and exclude any foreign source income. And this would put the Americans, as individuals and as corporations, on a level playing field with citizens from other countries around the world.

At the time I saw him, there had been no response from the House of Representatives. Any bill that finally gets to Congress has to be supported by both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Since that time the House has now come up with a bill very consistent with Senator DeMint's. Now we don't expect this bill to be acted upon this year. It would be very unusual for Congress to pass a bill in March and then pass another bill in October, reversing the bill.

But we are going to continue to work on that. We will need support from American corporations, and the main argument -- and Senator DeMint pointed this out -- is not that some taxpayers are getting tax paying and others are not. That's not fair. You cannot cry about getting taxed. It does not work, because somebody's got to get taxed.

The argument here is that this new tax law is creating an anti-competitive situation for American corporations in a global economy and for American executives. This current tax law is going to diminish the desirability of foreign assignments. That's going to affect the workforce in the United States in terms of the options of executives in a global economy -- that's crazy -- and it's going to affect significantly the tax burden of corporations who persuade their executives to go abroad in part by saying they will subsidize their onerous taxes.

So, we do have, on the second part of the bill, some hope that next year we will be able to get relief and we are going to need the support of American companies. And now I will be coming back to your companies anew for support on the legislation to reverse the entire process of double taxation.

And on the first point, the housing exclusion, that's where the glimmer of silver light is appearing or at least it's possible, and it's possible this year, and we will keep you posted on our efforts to do that. And again I would like to thank Peter and Sergei for moving so quickly in putting together such a professional document which I think will form the basis, certainly does form the basis for a favorable treasury solution to the housing exclusion. Thank you.

(АПЛОДИСМЕНТЫ)

ГОРЮШИНА: And we would like to thank both speakers for this interesting presentation and AmCham for the efforts they are making in resolving the issue. And I am happy to tell you that the last statement that this will be the last presentation and topic in our discussion may be wrong because we are not going to miss such an interesting subject as VAT from our agenda. And Alexei Panich, Senior Associate from Salans, will be presenting on the recent developments in the area of VAT.

ПАНИЧ: Добрый день, уважаемые участники. Тема моей презентации -- это изменения в законодательстве и в судебной практике, которые касаются основного российского налога, налога на добавленную стоимость. В отношении тех изменений, которые произошли в законодательстве, я хотел бы прежде всего остановиться на изменениях, которые были внесены в 21-ю Главу Налогового кодекса Законом номер 137-ФЗ от 17 июля 2006 года.

Большая часть тех изменений, которые были внесены в 21-ю Главу, они носят технических характер. Мне же хотелось бы остановиться на тех изменениях, которые носят концептуальный характер. Это прежде всего изменения, касающиеся 176-й Статьи Налогового кодекса, то есть возмещения налога на добавленную стоимость. И кроме этого, также изменение, касающееся налогового периода.

Значит, изменения, которые касаются возмещения НДС, они вступают в силу с 1 января 2007 года, то есть уже довольно скоро. И эти изменения прежде всего коснулись унификации тех правил, которые применяются к возмещению налога в случае, когда такой налог касается внутреннего рынка, то есть когда применяются ставки НДС -- 18 процентов, 9 процентов, и соответственно те изменения, которые касаются применения нулевой процентной ставки по НДС. То есть, сейчас правила различны. То есть, в отношении внутреннего НДС действуют правила, установленные первыми тремя пунктами 176-й Статьи, в отношении экспортного НДС действует пункт 4-й 176-й Статьи. С Нового года производится унификация этих правил, то есть разницы нет в отношении двух этих видов НДС. Но в принципе та разница, которая существовала, она носила и носит достаточно искусственный характер.

Значит, что появляется нового в связи с этой унификацией? Появляется закрепленная 176-й Статьей обязанность налогового органа принимать решение по возмещению внутреннего НДС. То есть текущая редакция, она прямо такой обязанности не предусматривает. На практике, безусловно, налоговой орган, как правило, принимал решение. Такое решение, правда, в большинстве случаев носило отказной характер, теперь же такая обязанность прямо предусмотрена 176-й Статьей с 1 января 2007 года.

Исчезает из 176-й Статьи еще одна норма, это норма, касающаяся обязанности налогового органа в отношении экспортного НДС. В том случае, если в установленный законом срок решение не было принято, либо она не было направлено налогоплательщику в установленный срок, принять положительное решение по возмещению НДС. То есть такой нормы теперь не будет. Однако здесь необходимо отметить то, что на практике эта норма практически никогда не работала. То есть и налоговый орган по столь формальному основанию никогда не вынес бы положительного решения и, собственно говоря, суды в том случае, если все доводы налогоплательщика сводились исключительно к формальному признаку со ссылкой на то, что соответствующее решение не было принято в установленный срок, в связи с чем подлежит вынесению положительное решении, так вот, суды никогда не соглашались с таким доводом, то есть всегда исследовались все обстоятельства, связанные с обоснованностью возмещения такого налога.

Значит, еще одним, и, наверное, наиболее существенным, изменением, которое касается возмещение НДС, является изменение порядка проведения камеральной проверки. Ну, эти изменения, они, естественно, касаются не только НДС, но именно в отношении НДС такие изменения имеют наибольшее значение с моей точки зрения.

Значит, что происходит сейчас? По результатам камеральной проверки налогоплательщик получает решение -- как уже говорилось, как правило, это отказное решение, -- и, соответственно, налогоплательщик только из этого решение узнает, какие же именно дефекты имели место в том комплекте документов, которые он представлял в инспекцию в обоснование своего права на возмещение НДС. При этом, инспекция в подавляющем большинстве случаев не пользуется тем правом, которое фактически является же ее обязанностью по 88-й Статье -- в случае выявления каких-либо ошибок в представленном комплекте документов или несоответствий, обращаться к налогоплательщика за получением дополнительных сведений и документов.

Получив отказное решение, налогоплательщик сейчас может обратиться в суд и попытаться отстоять свое право на возмещение налога в том числе, поскольку по ряду решений по результатам камеральных проверок налогоплательщики привлекаются к ответственности, налогоплательщик также пытается отстоять также и тот факт, что он не виновен в совершении вменяемого ему налогового правонарушения.

Однако в результате изменения судебной практики в последнее время -- о них я скажу чуть позднее -- в принципе возникала ситуация, при которой налогоплательщик был лишен возможности представлять дополнительные документы в суд, если такие документы не представлялись в рамках камеральной проверки. То есть в результате изменения судебной практики фактически образовался некий вакуум, который приводил к тому, что налогоплательщик был лишен возможности отстаивать свои права в рамках камеральной проверки, но впоследствии был также лишен возможности отстаивать свои права в суде. То есть фактически возникало и продолжает возникать полное бесправие налогоплательщика в отношении тех прав, которые фактически гарантированы НК -- то есть право на возмещение налога на добавленную стоимость.

Так вот, в связи с теми изменениями, которые были внесены, теперь фактически камеральная проверка в тех случаях, когда речь идет о выявлении нарушений законодательства, по порядку ее проведения приравнена к выездной налоговой проверке. То есть теперь необходимо составлять акт. Этот акт должен направляться налогоплательщику. Соответственно, производится рассмотрение такого акта и тех возражений, которые налогоплательщик представляет в Налоговую инспекцию, и только после этого возможно вынесение решения.

Таким образом, налогоплательщик получает существенную защиту своих прав за счет того, что, увидев те претензии, которые к нему предъявляет налоговый орган по результатам камеральной проверки, налогоплательщик вправе представить новые документы, вправе представить исправленные документы. То есть фактически сейчас в законодательстве закреплено то право налогоплательщика, которое раньше признавалось за налогоплательщиками судами -- когда какие-либо дефекты в документах налогоплательщик имел возможность исправить в рамках судебного разбирательства, представляя новые доказательства в суд.

В отношении новых сроков, которые теперь установлены 176-й Статьей. Значит, сроки возмещения НДС меняются. Если текущая редакция предусматривает то, что после, соответственно, проведения проверки у налогового органа имеется семь дней -- опять же в случае, когда вынесено положительное решение по вопросу о возмещении НДС -- на то, чтобы, соответственно, это решение получило Казначейство, и далее в Казначейства есть две недели на то, чтобы произвести реальное возмещение налога путем возврата, то теперь установлены несколько другие сроки. То есть после того, как закончена проверка, в течение семи дней необходимо выносить решение. Далее налоговый орган в течение одного дня отправляет, это решение на исполнение в Казначейство. И далее Казначейство имеет всего пять дней на то, чтобы произвести возврат НДС. То есть сроки немного меняются, фактически они сокращены в той стадии, которая касается стадии исполнения решения налогового органа по возврату НДС.

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

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