Representatives of the business community said at the meeting that the quality of the services provided by the Federal Tax Service (FTS) was much higher than that of non-budget funds where online personal accounts, risk-rating audits, and out-of-court settlements were concerned. President of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Alexander Shokhin presented a poll conducted among businesspeople on entrusting the FTS with the administration functions of insurance payments. Mr Shokhin said the FTS had become a good partner for the business community, with experts introducing an online system and helping to open personal accounts online. But more than half of respondents (60%) do not support the idea of transferring the administration functions to the FTS, while 40% believe that the quality of its administration was approximately the same as that of non-budget funds.
Alexander Galushka, Co-Chairman of the Delovaya Rossiya national public organisation, said that Delovaya Rossiya saw the transfer of the administration functions to the Federal Tax Service as expedient. In his words, 68.8% of the 1,187 respondents in their poll spoke out in favour of handing the functions over to the FTS.
Sergei Borisov, Head of the Board of Trustees of the Opora Russia association of entrepreneurs, presented the results of their own poll: Around 51% of respondents called for the functions from state-run non-budget funds to be transferred to the FTS. Another 21% were undecided, saying that the situation, as they saw it, was not changing. He also said they had observed that replies depended on the size of a business. The share of small businesses which thought it necessary to transfer powers to a single agency was higher than that of medium-sized and big businesses.
Minister Mikhail Abyzov praised the efficiency of the discussions: “Our next job is to sum up all the pros and cons; we should confine everything to a single document. We’ll make the tally public and it will be submitted as a report to the Prime Minister for subsequent discussion, with the participation of deputy prime ministers in order to make decisions as part of efforts to carry out Government instructions.”
Source: Open Government
