"We hate you": Ombudsman Tatulova told about the attitude of business to the authorities

4 июня 2021, 10:54
Anastasia Tatulova (pictured), the public ombudsman for small and medium-sized businesses, the founder of the Anderson family café chain, made a devastating speech at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum.

She criticized the economic policy of the authorities, which led to "a total crisis of confidence in the authorities and business, and a lot of problems stem from this".

“You spit on us, you talk to us in a fatherly way, like with the needy, they say, we know what you need. And we hate you. And this is bad for everyone”, - Tatulova said.

According to the public ombudsman, until this trust is built, the rules of the game are not fixed - at least for a certain period - there will be no development.

“Fix it for 10 years”, - she suggested, - No need to change anything. Don't make us happy. Just become. We do not have time to read what you write".

Tatulova's speech, according to the participants of the forum, “blew up” his measured, sugary move, reminiscent of the course of the congresses of the CPSU, the publication finanz.ru notes.

According to Tatulova, the problem of business security in Russia has recently escalated so much that people think about emigration "every Friday": businessmen are imprisoned in jail, strangled with unaffordable taxes, "they shine lamps in their eyes" during interrogations at the tax office, and are killed with fines.

According to the ombudsman, any gesture of the state to "help" small business ends with one result - it becomes more difficult for civilized and conscientious market participants to work, while the "shadow sector" gains competitive advantages. The Ombudsman believes that the reason for the bias is that the officials responsible for making decisions live in a different world.

“Businesses in any industry need only two things to grow rapidly - efficiency and safety. Nowhere, not in any slogan at the moment, not in any next strategy, there are not even such words. Anything is there - digitalization, acceleration, generation, sandbox. Only these two words are missing”, - said the Ombudsman.

As an example, she said that in the pandemic year 2020, when the number of inspections decreased threefold, the volume of fines imposed on businesses increased 8 times. At the same time, the cost of the fee in Rosreestr for registering an additional agreement to the lease has soared not 2, not 3, but 22 times. The creation of a single solid waste operator will lead to a 5-fold increase in waste collection fees for businesses.

Outraged by the "draconian" size of fines imposed on small businesses, Tatulova said that their size is set by people with an annual income of 190 million rubles, for whom 300 thousand is "for dog food".

“This is normal for them”, - Tatulova said.

But representatives of small business do not have such incomes as officials who have “lost touch with the people”.

Because of the monstrous administrative pressure, small businesses have no choice but to “go into the shadows”.

“If you are “gray”, no one sees you, as soon as you pay taxes, all and sundry come to you”, - Tatulova said.

She added that the vaunted measures to support small businesses turned out to be nothing: with a two-fold reduction in insurance premiums, people were deceived. All the "gigantic aid" remained on paper: instead of 30 thousand taxes per average worker, entrepreneurs pay not the promised 15 thousand contributions, but all 24 thousand.

“They did it right”, - the Ombudsman said indignantly.

Business is especially dissatisfied with the fact that inspectors receive bonuses from the volume of fines issued, which turns the control authorities into an instrument of unlimited non-tax taking money from people.

According to Tatulova, the tax regime should be such that “a person can make a profit, invest it, so that the country develops, since he is investing this money here and has not left yet, despite the fact that he thinks about it every Friday”.

The Ombudsman demanded to revise the KPI of the supervisory authorities, which now motivates the inspectors to find violations, as well as to verify all adopted laws directly with the business. She also proposed to prohibit banks from interfering in business affairs: to block accounts and write off money, to exclude interrogations from the tax service.

Otherwise, the stratum of small business in the country will never reach the 25 million people declared in the strategic doctrine. This doctrine has already failed. At the end of 2020, the number of SMEs in the country decreased by another 3.9%, to 5.864 million. The number of individual entrepreneurs also decreased to 3.312 million (by 2.2%). Unlike “well-fed officials with a salary of 190 million rubles,” the average salary in a small business on April 1 fell by 17% - to 30.7 thousand rubles.

During her speech, Tatulova repeatedly uttered the word "security": right on the eve of the meeting, one of the Sochi entrepreneurs was placed in a pre-trial detention center.

“Boris Yuryevich, I’ll tell you here all these things, but will you get me out of the jail later?”, - she turned to the business ombudsman Boris Titov, anticipating her devastating speech.

Earlier Tatulova said that the organizers demanded almost a million rubles from her for the right to speak at the forum. She refused to pay for her performance, writing an angry post on Facebook:

“Dear SPIEF organizers, I am surprised to see my photo in the program. I beg you to remove it from the site, or cross it out with the words "rogue" and the phrase "this speaker did not agree to pay 900 thousand rubles for a speech", - she said.

After the scandal, the organizers announced that they would allow the Ombudsman to speak for free.

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