The Association of E-commerce Companies (ACIT) has listened to the
idea of Dmitry Medvedev to introduce restrictions on the purchase of American goods for Russian companies and users. Only ACIT offers to approach the issue more competently: to introduce not a ban on imports, but a 30% VAT on purchases in online stores from “unfriendly countries”. The corresponding initiative was
sent on April 13, 2018 to the name of State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin.
According to the authors of the document, the introduction of such a tax will solve three problems at once:
- It will serve as a response to the unfriendly policy of foreign states (counter-sanctions).
- It will be a stimulus for the development of import substitution, the growth of domestic industry and trade.
- It will allow to receive more than 30 billion rubles of additional revenues to the Russian budget.
First of all, the tax will concern eBay and Amazon stores, according to AKIT.
“We insist on setting the obligation to pay taxes and customs duties by foreign online stores with a cross-border trade flow. The amount of the fee should be at least 30%, which corresponds to the fees for classic imports (18% VAT and 10-15% customs duty), in this case, the duty-free threshold should be reduced to zero, ”said Alex Atyor Fedorov.
The association of e-commerce companies has long advocated an increase in the tax burden on foreign online stores, although everyone understands that this tax will eventually be passed on to end customers.
Back in 2016, ACIT
proposed to introduce VAT for foreign stores by analogy with the
“Google tax” , which introduces VAT for foreign Internet companies.
ACIT believes that in the current situation, foreign online stores have an unfair competitive advantage. “Today, foreign retailers can sell goods to Russia via the Internet without taxes and duties, thereby obtaining an average competitive price advantage of 30%,” Alexei Fedorov said at the time. His position has not changed now.
Foreign online stores are rapidly increasing their shipments to Russia and may oust domestic merchants from the market, according to ACIT. According to the catastrophic forecast for the domestic trade, by 2020 the online trade in household appliances and electronics will take up 26% of all sales of this product on the Russian market. In the clothing segment, a similar type of trade will grow to 20%, in footwear - up to 17%.
ACIT particularly emphasizes that the presence of cheap goods in foreign online stores is detrimental to the state. According to the estimates of the association, the expansion of foreign Internet sites on the Russian market has reached record levels of 36% of the total volume of the online trading market. The volume of tax-free trade in 2017 reached 374 billion rubles, of which 34% comes from the Internet sites of the United States and the European Union countries. It is noted that the Russian budget did not receive any income from this commercial turnover. The total amount of shortfall in income amounted to more than 80 billion rubles.
The position of ACIT is not supported by all experts. Some believe that taxing hundreds of thousands of sellers, for example, on Aliexpress, will be somewhat problematic: “Most of them are private individuals selling phone cases. Can you imagine how shallow their turnover is? And the collection of tax from less than 80 euros does not make sense, ”said the head of the National Association of Distance Trade (NADT), Alexander Ivanov.
The new initiative to tax only stores from “unfriendly countries” looks as difficult to implement, just like the previous initiative to impose VAT on absolutely all foreign online stores. After all, the same eBay works as a large marketplace for thousands of small sellers. It is unlikely that all these sellers can be forced to register with the Russian tax inspectorate and pay the tax, as representatives of large Internet companies were forced to do in accordance with the “Google tax”.
And the very idea of paying VAT on purchases in a foreign store looks doubtful. For example, the Ministry of Industry and Trade believes that a purchase in a foreign online store should be equated with a purchase in a stationary, that is, an ordinary store abroad. If a Russian tourist goes abroad and buys goods in a store, then this purchase is not taxed in Russia.
Today, in Russia, one person can receive online purchases of no more than € 1,000 per month without a duty payment and weighing no more than 31 kg. From July 1, 2018, the duty-free threshold is planned to be reduced to € 500, and in 2019 - to € 200. At the same time, online purchases from other countries are not subject to VAT.
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