L-R New head of the Tax Administration Lenka Wittenbergerová with the outgoing one, František Imrecze. (source: TASR)
Lenka Wittenbergerová, the incumbent (long-time) Director General of the Tax Section at the Slovak Financial Directorate, will be at the helm of the Financial Administration for the next six months. Finance Minister Peter Kažimír announced this after the cabinet session on September 26. He added that he has already signed her appointment decree and her term begins on October 1, 2018.
“I have confidence in her and we have agreed that she is prepared to serve in this post for the next six months,” the minister said, as quoted by the SITA newswire. He added that the new interim head of the Financial Administration will have a free hand in HR matters following the resignation of Financial Administration President František Imrecze. “She is not taking over this post with any commitments concerning personnel policy,” Kažimír summed up, as cited by SITA.
Imrecze announced his decision to resign from the post last week at a session of the parliamentary financial committee where he had come to provide an explanation regarding the scandal involving Chinese goods-related customs fraud. He led the Financial Administration almost from its origin in 2012.
Resigned head’s credit
“I found it disrupted, with a non-functional information system and missing data on tax entities, which created an ideal space for tax fraud. So, my colleagues and I immediately focused on tax fraud involving excessive VAT deductions, which were absolutely massive,” Imrecze noted for the TASR newswire, adding that Financial Administration brought an extra €3.7 billion into the state budget thanks to the elimination of excessive deductions. He also boasted that in those six years, Slovakia has become one of the countries that reduce their tax gap the fastest – slashing it from 41 to 26 percent.
Plans and outlook
“I want to continue the processes that we set along with the outgoing president,” the new FA head said, adding that the office has undergone significant changes over the past six years. “We managed to launch the path of electronisation and digitisation, and I want to continue in this direction,” said Wittenbergerová, as quoted by TASR.
Her goal is to create a paper-free financial administration. “Therefore, we’ll keep working on expanding electronic communications and implementing full two-way electronic communications. My priorities also include adopting and implementing the law on financial administration,” she explained.
Wittenbergerová graduated from the Economy College in Bratislava (now transformed into the University of Economy) and since then, she has worked on several positions at the tax administration.
