Serbia has a complicated, unjust and complex tax system which needs to be thoroughly reformed, instead of changed or amended – both experts and business people agree.
Director of the Business Support Network, Dragoljub Rajic says that Serbia would be a much better place for doing business if the existing tax system were less complicated. Currently, a company needs a number of bookkeepers, financial and legal experts to calculate taxes. He also says that the VAT manual has an incredible 250 pages, while the accompanying documents (with additional interpretation of certain parts of the manual) have 1,250 pages.
“We are talking about a manual that has more pages than the Bible itself”, says Rajic. He outlines that complicated tax explanations create confusion, and that, only last year, 11,000 companies in Serbia launched legal proceedings on the account of their taxes being wrongly calculated.
“In Germany, for example, there are only 600 legal proceedings on the account of wrongly calculated taxes because their tax system is simple and transparent, and is not constantly redone or changed like in Serbia”, Rajic adds.
A member of the Association of Small and Medium Enterprises, Milan Knezevic agrees and adds that “the Serbian tax system makes no sense because taxes are the same for those companies which earn very little and those which earn a lot”, and that it should be thoroughly reformed.
He adds that it is absolutely unacceptable that Serbia has the lowest tax profit in the world while the enterprises are taxed immediately after launching their business. “In America, a company is obligated to pay tax only when its revenue surpasses $25,000”, he explains.
The editor of Bookkeeping magazine, Rada Stojanovic says that the latest changes entail that tax applications should now have 190 items instead of the previous 17. She adds that, in the EU, the average is 39.
(021.rs, 23.08.2017)
This post is also available in: Italiano