Hungarian tax office APEH will pay special attention to tax avoidance, illegal labour, computer parts traders and transfer prices in 2009, APEH president Janos Szikora told MTI.
APEH will introduce simpler tax and VAT returns, as well as a list of corporate taxpayers who owe no back taxes, Mr Szikora said. The first list will be published on February 10 and updated monthly.
APEH will focus on taxpayers who pay suspiciously little tax in 2009. Last year, APEH discovered HUF 460bn in back taxes owed by tax shirkers.
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Is this a mis-translation? Tax avoidance is legal, its tax evasion that’s not.
I can find no use of evasion (adócsalás), but there is the phrase ‘deliberate avoidance’ (szándékos adóelkerülés), though I am not entirely sure what they mean by avoidance (adófizetés elkerülése) as this pretty much standard business practice. This phrase reminds me of some of the laws brought in in the UK that required companies to declare any tax avoidance strategies they used or those of known loopholes. Perhaps this is what is meant, but I would have thought something would have to be on the statute book first.
I don’t pay for the MTI or MTI-ECONEWS so I wait for others to regurgitate the stuff; which they normally do verbatim. I found the regurgitated version on gondola (http://gondola.hu/hirek/87891 ) which uses the phrase ‘adóminimalizálók’ – which the English version translates as ‘tax shirkers’ (as above), but is simply those that seek to minimise their tax (literally tax-minimisers).
The Hungarian version also mentions that they’ll be picking on computer peripherals and parts traders – so buy any hardware now before it goes up in price (who on earth buys computers in Hungary anyway?).
To be honest, I don’t know where Hungarian law stands on this one, but I am pretty sure that it will not be so clear cut. Like the mess they made of lumping ‘freedom of information’ and ‘data protection’ under the one act and then expecting the decrepit courts to pick through the mess.
@Stan. Well, if their intent is to go after those who are implementing legal strategies for minimizing their taxes, then I’m even more dismayed. It’s bad enough enough that the gov’t sets unreasonable rates, rules and bureacracy; that the APEH then levy ridiculous fines for simple mistakes; and now we’re hearing that even those who are finding valid means to minimise their taxes are now in the sights of the president of APEH.
With all of this scrutiny, where’s the incentive for creating the jobs, trade, demand?