Today
the Human Rights Defender Mr. Arman Tatoyan applied to the Constitutional Court
challenging that the Tax Code does not stipulate a flexible mechanism for
issuing fines for violating the Cash Control Machines (CCMs) rules and that instead,
fixed rates of fines are set without taking into account the circumstances of a
particular offense.
As
an agreement on the rapid resolution of the issue through relevant reforms had been
reached with the Government, the Defender withdrew the recently submitted
application in that regard. Nevertheless, considering that since then the
Government did not accept the existence of an issue on conformity with the
Constitution and no changes were introduced thereby, the Human Rights Defender
once again applied to the Constitutional Court, since the issue remains
relevant.
In
particular, this refers to Article 416, Sections
1-5.1 of the Code, that for the absence of a CCM
which meets the
technical requirements, envisages
a fine of 300․000 AMD for an organization, individual entrepreneur or a notary,
and a fine of 1․000․000
AMD for
activities of public catering carried
out in a public catering facility. As a result, the law predetermines fine
rates for the tax authority and
does not grant any exception.
In
particular, the fines are imposed without
individualization: they are not imposed based on the turnover volume of a business
enterprise. When the offense is detected for the first time, the business entity is fined regardless of objective
and subjective factors of commiting the offense.
High
fine rates are also problematic, and this puts newly established and/or small
business entities in difficult economic condition as opposed to long-standing
and large businesses. While for some business entities, this results right up to termination of entrepreneurial
activities.
The mentioned situation fails to ensure the
constitutional requirement to gurantee engagement in economic and entrepreneurial
activities. This, in turn, results in disproportionate interference with the constitutional right to engage in
economic, including entrepreneurial activities by tax authorities.
Հայերեն
