Back
Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Pidlasa explained why some communities accumulate billions while others depend on subsidies.
As of 1 October of this year, balances on local budget accounts amounted to 188 billion UAH, with an increase of 90 billion UAH since the beginning of the year. The main problem of local finances is an unfair distribution of funds. This was stated by the chair of the Verkhovna Rada Budget Committee Roksolana Pidlasa in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine, answering a question about the state budget for 2027.
“So in regional budgets and the budgets of large cities there are billions on the accounts, while small rural communities do not have funds to pay salaries in communal institutions and will not survive without budget subsidies,” she said.
According to her, the list of issues from local budgets regarding the draft state budget is standard: leave communities 64% of the personal income tax (PIT) instead of the 60% proposed by the government, do not withdraw the reverse transfer, return the military PIT, increase the additional subsidy for frontline communities.
“Overall, the essence of these wishes and proposals from members of parliament boils down to the need to take more money from the state budget and transfer it to the communities,” she noted.
In her view, there is no quick solution to the problem of unfair distribution of funds; it will not be possible to solve it by leaving the reverse transfer for all communities or by taking the military PIT from the army and giving it to the communities.
“In general, we need a more equitable horizontal equalization, because right now, roughly speaking, it takes into account some revenues (corporate profit tax and PIT) and population size,” Pidlasa believes.
She explained that, besides issues with population figures in the calculation base, horizontal equalization does not account for very different mandatory expenditures, because communities are not the same and have different existing social infrastructure.
“They may have been given a hospital, one community may have more schools, and in some village a national museum or some architectural monument may be maintained, some have a lot of unregistered internally displaced persons, and so on… There can be many such factors,” she added.
There is also a separate discussion about PIT paid at the place of a company's registration, which also causes distortions.
“For example, in our top 10 by account balances is Borshchahivka rural community near Kyiv: they have more than 1 billion UAH on their accounts. And there are many such satellite towns and villages,” Pidlasa explained.
Regarding reforming the PIT system, there is currently a group that defends the principle of 50 on 50: 50% of PIT is paid at the place of company registration, 50% — at the employee’s place of residence. At the same time, another group advocates for 100% PIT payment at the person’s place of residence.
“I think it is unlikely that this reform — both PIT and horizontal equalization — is possible before the end of the war and a full population census. So we are constantly in some kind of conflict situation,” Pidlasa summed up.
Earlier the Association of Ukrainian Cities appealed to Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi for the government to immediately unblock funds needed, among other things, for winter preparations. Oksana Prodan, adviser to the AUC chair, has already stated that by freezing the allocation of funds to communities the Cabinet of Ministers is violating the law.
The chair of the parliamentary budget committee Roksolana Pidlasa reported that the Ministry of Finance postponed 39 billion UAH of capital expenditures to December. These are the very funds that were supposed to go toward protecting the energy sector before the heating season, building shelters in schools and hospitals, reconstructing medical facilities, and social housing. Moving capital expenditures to the end of the year, she said, effectively means they will not be financed this year.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "На рахунках місцевих бюджетів лежить 188 млрд грн: Підласа назвала головну проблему громад". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: ZN.ua.
