Businessmen cannot get state support because of the pennyworth debts

Even businessmen who regularly pay taxes can have debts to the tax. Penny debts can arise because the bank commission is deducted from the transferred amount. If the entrepreneur incorrectly calculates it from the amount of tax paid, then he will go into the status of debtors, even if the amount of debt is minus 0.01 rubles. Some entrepreneurs because of this have now received a refusal of subsidies from the state.

In mid-April, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced another measure of support for small and medium-sized businesses affected by the coronavirus - financial support from the state for paying salaries to employees. The only condition is that the businessman had to save more than 90% of the entire staff. The state compensates for the minimum cost of living - 12.1 thousand rubles per person. For these purposes, 80 billion rubles were allocated from the budget. The program is designed for over 970 thousand companies. Now it became known about an additional condition - the entrepreneur should not have tax arrears. To receive the April subsidy, the application is submitted in May, to receive the subsidy in May - the next month.

Aleksandr Ovesnov, a partner in tax dispute practice at MEF PKF, noted that in practice many companies have small tax arrears, which will now prevent them from using state support. According to Dmitry Kostalgin, managing partner of Taxadvisor, the absence of tax debt is an outdated requirement that creates the appearance of protection against abuse, but actually limits the help. “Technical debts often arise as a result of rounding amounts, untimely set-off of payments, data transfer. An entrepreneur can be sure that he paid taxes on time, but he can unexpectedly find a debt from his company, ”writes RBC with reference to the expert.

In addition, due to a failure in the Federal Tax Service system last year, a number of entrepreneurs “surfaced” a non-existent debt for the year 2000 for the canceled sales tax. Debts of a number of companies are still hanging, lawyer Ivan Yagolovich told the publication.

The head of the RF CCI Sergey Katyrin is sure that minor errors should not prevent entrepreneurs from gaining state support and preserving jobs during the crisis. Previously, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry also announced that half of the entrepreneurs surveyed by them who suffered from coronavirus could not benefit from state support, since they did not get on the list of affected industries, although in fact a new disease paralyzed their activities. Earlier, Novye Izvestia wrote that about two-thirds of the companies that were included in the list of sectors affected by the coronavirus also cannot take advantage of state support on formal grounds : the authorities indicated a limited list of OKVED - company activity codes that are indicated during registration, activity of businessmen did not coincide with the list of the state.