LESS than an hour after a vast amendment to the income tax was passed in parliament on October 30, the opposition announced they would contest it at the Constitutional Court.
The amendment to the Act on Taxes changes for example the rules for depreciation of material property and introduces limits when purchasing vehicles meant for doing business, while also introducing the cash registries, the TASR newswire wrote.
Independent MP Jozef Kollár claims, as quoted by the SITA newswire, that the passed changes concerning depreciation are retroactive; as the period for depreciating non-production real estates has been doubled from 20 to 40 years, the prolongation will apply also to the properties acquired by businesspeople before January 1, 2015, and thus is now depreciated according to the old rules. Kollár also argues that the passed changes represent a marked increase in the income tax, bringing €840 million in the next three years to the state budget. The sheer number of changes complicates the current tax law which should be our competitive advantage.
“I want to collect 30 signatures of opposition MPs and file a motion with the Constitutional Court exactly because of the retroactivity,” Kollár said, as quoted by SITA. In the criticism, he was joined by MPs of the Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) party.
Finance Minister Peter Kažimír denied the accusations of opposition that the amendment, will “suck” €265 million from businesses in the coming year. He also refused the notion that the tax burden for entrepreneurs would be increased by this step. “If we collect more on any tax, that does not necessarily mean that we are increasing the tax burden,” he said, according to TASR. “We strive for a fairer distribution of this burden. We live in an environment where it is customary to circumvent tax laws,” he argued, adding that the government is on a good path to achieve a balanced public budget.
(Source: TASR, SITA)
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
