Duma Official Urges Change To Distribution Of Tax Revenues

by Tatiana Smolenskaya, Tax-News.com, Moscow

12 November 2002

State Duma Budget Committee Deputy Chairman, Vitaly Shuba recently raised the possibility of extending the list of tax revenues which can be transferred to the budgets of the regional authorities, according to a Pravda report published on Monday.

A government commission headed by Dmitry Kozak, deputy head of President Putin's administration, has been examining the division of authority within government on federal, regional, and municipal levels. Under the terms of bills put forward by the commission, additional responsibilities would be reassigned from the central government to the regional and municipal authorities, with certain tax revenues to be diverted in order to provide financial support for this move.

However, according to Pravda, the Budget Committee Deputy Chairman has expressed concern that the detail of the method whereby this additional revenue is to be distributed has not been thoroughly examined by the Kozak commission.

'In his opinion, the main difficulty is the difference between the potential of different regions for receiving tax revenues. This difference has to be reduced, and the tax revenues to be reassigned to the regions or redistributed in accordance with the new system should be thoroughly analyzed,' the news service revealed on Monday.

'In general, such taxes can include duties on natural resources, the water tax, the forest tax, the tax on mineral resources, as well as the individual income tax,' the report concluded.

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