OREANDA-NEWS  The Government Commission on Legislative Activity approved the prepared amendments to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, mitigating the punishment for tax crimes. Kommersant writes about this.

According to the innovations, entrepreneurs will be given a guarantee that in case of payment of all arrears and penalties, they will not be prosecuted.

In addition, it is planned to significantly reduce the terms of prosecution for tax evasion, ten to six years, they will be equated to the period of storage of accounting documents. Thus, crimes under these articles go from serious to the category of small and medium gravity.

The government must approve the package of amendments on Wednesday at the next meeting, after which the bill will be submitted to the State Duma.

The explanatory note states that Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed to develop such measures in April 2022, but the timing of approval was delayed due to disagreements between the departments: the Ministry of Justice on the one hand, and the Ministry of Finance and the Investigative Committee of Russia on the other.

Earlier it became known that the Federal Tax Service (FTS) warned the regions that they need to return the amounts of taxes overpaid by companies. We are talking about the return of overpayments for regional and municipal taxes after the introduction of new mechanisms — a single tax account (ENS) and a single tax payment (EPP).