The Rada will consider scandalous and unacceptable bills that will harm the people and the state budget — list

The Rada will consider scandalous and unacceptable bills that will harm the people and the state budget — list

On today’s agenda of the Verkhovna Rada is, 15 July, a whole batch of scandalous bills that were not considered yesterday. Now everyone will try to push them through the parliament.

Here are the main ones:

Draft bill No. 5593 – d, which transfers state property to external management.

Draft bill No. 2713-d on the legalization of gambling authored by Oleh Marusyak, which sharply reduces the tax rate for gaming operators — to 10%. It also eliminates the triple license fee for bookmakers, casinos, and gaming machines until the online monitoring system is introduced. It also introduces a tax concession on winnings: personal income tax (PIT) of 18% is proposed to be charged only on large winnings — over 48 thousand UAH, and not on all others.

Draft bill No. 5475, which is being adopted solely to create yet another office for another Ombudsman at budget expense. The document proposes not just to create a position for one person but to establish a whole institute — an Office of the Ombudsman for Medical Issues: with its own staff, apparatus, budget, and market salaries for “its own.” It is also interesting that first the bill’s authors propose to create this Office, and only then to task the Cabinet of Ministers with drafting a law on protecting the rights of patients whom this office would allegedly protect. The result is that the enacted norms of the law will not exist, but the Office of the Ombudsman will already be operating at full tilt.

At the end of the plenary day they put on the agenda draft No. 4278, which makes changes to VAT taxation of import operations of goods into Ukraine in international postal and express shipments. They want to tax packages from abroad with a value over 150 euros, not 100 euros as now.

And also in the bill they try to push through an amendment by the head of the Servant of the People faction, David Arakhamia, to reduce duties on TWENs (electronic cigarette sticks) for tobacco product manufacturers. Despite the fact that it does not relate to the bill’s topic and there are many questions:

First, this amendment has nothing to do with the taxation of postal shipments.

Second, this is the second attempt to push through the same amendment (the first was at the end of 2020 year).

Third, everyone understands that this amendment is blatantly lobbied and deals a big blow to the totally deficit state budget.

Amendment No. 55 (author Getmanets and Committee members) lowers the excise tax on TWENs starting 1 April 2021 of year by 40% — from 1456,33 UAH to 1025,79 UAH for 1000 units. In 2022 – 2024 year the excise tax rate on TWENs is also reduced.

This means that tax relief is coming retroactively, which is unheard of and unacceptable.

According to preliminary calculations, budget losses just from excise tax (needs to add 20% VAT) will be:

in 2021 year — 1,8-1,2 billion UAH;

in 2022 year — 2,8 billion UAH;

in 2023 — 3,0 billion UAH;

in 2024 year — 2,3 billion UAH.

That is, even by the most modest estimates, the country’s budget will annually forego more than 3 billion UAH because of “Arakhamiya’s bill.”

Andriy Shchenichnyi for the site dubinsky.ua