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IV. Checks, fines and penalties
The character of checks and the system of penalties of commercial organizations in Belarus is a good confirmation of the trust crisis between business and the authorities. Belarusian enterprises are checked often and for a long time, approximately 10 times per year. When checking inspectors and controllers work on an enterprise in the course of two months, it can be then hard to concentrate on the innovative work. The bigger an enterprise is the more often it has checks, the bigger fines, sanctions and ‛voluntary“ contributions are. The controlling and fiscal bodies put obstacles on the way of formation of competitive national business. Fines and sanctions exceed the size of charged amounts in more than 100 times which leads to destabilization of activity of an enterprise, and often even to liquidation.
There is no a uniform practice of law enforcement in the sphere of business activity control. There is lacking a coordination between more than 20 control bodies. Scheduled and nonscheduled checks happen so often that more than 90% of enterprises declare annual checking by different state structures. Executive committees, tax administrations, fire safety check-up, sanitary inspectors, the police, licensing institutions and structures which keep price formation - any check can lead to bankruptcy of an enterprise. But for all that individual entrepreneurs are checked longer than small- and medium-sized business.
Commercial organizations and individual entrepreneurs have no protection from the controlling bodies. There are lacking rules of check conducting, transparency of its procedures. Sanctions are used on the basis of intermediate checking acts. Extra reactionary practice of unquestionable recovery of sanction amounts from accounts of enterprises is used very often. Controllers often replace functions of the court system and break the basic property rights: they withdraw and confiscate property, seize the assets, stop operations on accounts and so on. There is no statue of limitation on bringing to account for tax violations in the legislation, whereas the deadline set for the return to the budget superfluous amounts satisfied from an entrepreneur is 1 year. There is no a clear mechanism of punishment the controlling bodies for the caused damage to business. The procedures and the terms of reimbursement of the caused by the state structures damage to commercial organizations are not indicated.
We believe that a good partnership of business and the authorities would appear in legislative form of the next issues:
Ø setting a limit for the fine size from a legal person: 5% form the amount charged to the budget;
Ø Implementation of a clear differentiation of the fine depending on the kind of violation of the legislation;
Ø Bringing in correspondence to the current legislation of the Republic of Belarus the maximum limitation of the common amount of administrative fines to an official of a legal person on the amount of no more than 50 % of charged salary (Labour Code)for the correspondent month;
Ø To allow bank institutions to credit enterprises, organizations in the presence of a guarantee and a correspondence to the credit risk for paying taxes and fines;
Ø To abolish the Decree of the President of the Republic of Belarus #40 16.01.2002 because the majority of sanctions stipulated by the Decree are of a repeated, dubbed character and have been already foreseen in accounting for violation of the legislation;
Ø The practice of extrajudicial seizure of property of legal persons and individual entrepreneurs should be immediately stopped. It also concerns arresting of financial money resources on the bank accounts, indisputable writing off of financial money resources on the ground of one direction of taxation organs. Numerous misuses of taxation inspections cause great damage and disorder in transactions with contractors and state.
Ø We consider very important to develop and adopt a single normative act that will contain a comprehensive list of kinds of violations and the amounts of sanctions. Otherwise, the situation with imposing sanctions is of chaotic character: sanitary control stations, fire inspections, ecologic institutions, taxation organs, customs organs, police, currency control organs, registration organs, having different normative acts, apply them free enough that causes numerous repeated punishment for one and the same violation by different organs of authority. The size of fines should be correspondent to the size of damage caused to the society or the level of danger of a violation.
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