YEREVAN. – The Prime Minister of Armenia, Hovik Abrahamyan, on Saturday chaired a special session of the Cabinet.
As a result, the Government debated and subsequently approved the bill on making an amendment to the Law on Turnover Tax.
Abrahamyan informed that, as a result of his consultation with the President on Saturday, it was decided to postpone until July 1 the mandatory requirement for the acquisition and documentation of the goods that are specified by the Law on Turnover Tax.
This bill was recognized urgent, and immediately submitted to the National Assembly.
As reported earlier, pursuant to the amendments and additions to the Law on Turnover Tax, which has come into force in Armenia on October 1, 2014, the tax rate for businesses in the country has dropped from 3.5 percent to one percent. But, now, the businesses will have to submit documents on their commodity circulation. And if a business enterprise does not submit a respective document, it will be warned at first, and, subsequently, it will be fined.
But these amendments and additions have caused a considerable protest among the country’s small and medium-sized merchants. In their view, asking for these documents from the large businesses is unrealistic because the large businesses often do not provide documents to the small and medium-sized enterprises concerning the products.
The government, on the other hand, justifies these amendments and additions with the need to prevent tax evasion by Armenia’s large businesses.
As a result of protests as well as talks with Armenia’s public sector, however, the government drew attention to the fact that the small businesses lack—for the moment—the proficiency for making an inventory of their goods and products and filling out the respective complicated questionnaires, and therefore decided to extend the aforementioned deadline for four months, until Sunday, February 1, 2015.
But the merchants, who are protesting these amendments and additions to Armenia’s Law on Turnover Tax, had staged several demonstrations in recent days outside the Government Building.
