Officials propose to levy a tax on foreign companies that work with the data of Russian citizens. For example, they collect them for advertising campaigns. The initiative is already being compared with the “Google tax”, and they want to direct the money collected with its help to support the domestic IT sphere.This was reported by the Vedomosti newspaper with reference to the participants of the meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko.
He oversees the digital economy and last week held a meeting with representatives of IT companies (including 1C, Mail.ru Group, Yandex and others).
The new initiative is codenamed “Digital Tax”. It involves charging additional fees from foreign companies that use the data of Russian citizens and form an advertising policy on the territory of the Russian Federation. This includes analyzing user behavior to launch contextual advertising.
It is assumed that a decision on this issue will be made before mid-2021.
Economists of Russian universities and analytical institutes in a conversation in Izvestia gave a forecast for budget revenues after the possible adoption of the “Digital Tax”. They agree that at the first stage, revenues from it are unlikely to exceed 50-60 billion per year. Some experts believe that the numbers may grow in the future.
Karen Ghazaryan, chief analyst of the Russian Association of Electronic Communications, believes that subsidizing some market players at the expense of others may be ineffective. In a conversation with Vedomosti, he noted that it would be better to return to “a simplified form of obtaining zero VAT for developers and the exclusion of double taxation for Russian IT companies offering their services through foreign platforms.”
Analogs of similar digital taxes have already been adopted in a number of European countries. For example, in France, foreign IT companies whose annual turnover is at least €750 million have to pay the state 3% of their revenue in the country. It is worth noting that such a measure is temporary and experimental in nature.
In Russia, the so-called “Google tax” has already been in effect since 2017. It is aimed at collecting VAT from foreign companies that sell databases, games and other software on the territory of the Russian Federation. The introduction of the tax has led to an increase in prices for services and software of foreign developers.