Russian IT companies have received significant tax breaks since the beginning of 2021. On January 1, the provisions of FZ-265 “On Amendments to the Second Part of the Tax Code” came into force. Thanks to them, Russian developers of electronics and software were able to pay income tax of 3% instead of 20%, as well as reduce the rate of insurance premiums to 7.6% from the previous 14%.
To qualify for the privilege, a company must receive at least 90% of income from core activities, for example, from software development and sale. A legal entity also needs to have a minimum of seven employees.
To compensate for some of the lost income, from January 1, 2021, the VAT exemption for companies that sell foreign software in the Russian Federation was canceled, they began to pay 20% VAT to the budget. Zero VAT remained only for developers and suppliers of domestic software.
The budget is positive
In 2020, at the stage of developing the tax maneuver, it was planned that thanks to the measures taken, in 2021 the budget will receive an additional 42.5 billion rubles. The final fiscal result of the IT maneuver in 2021 will be even higher. On November 24, the head of the Ministry of Digital Industry Maksut Shadayev reported this to President Vladimir Putin: from January to September 2021, IT companies brought an additional 48 billion rubles to the budget. in the form of tax payments.
“The effect of support measures exceeded RUB 49 billion,” Olga Barinova, a representative of the secretariat of the profile Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko, told Vedomosti on December 23. “This is the result of systematic work. Thanks to incentives, IT companies’ revenues have grown by about 43% this year, which has increased employee salaries by 13%. Accordingly, tax revenues to the country’s budget have grown, ”Barinova explained.
Some IT companies have lost as a result of the tax maneuver. Among these there were official distributors who are not copyright holders and who receive the main income from sublicensing someone else’s software, or provide services for the maintenance and installation of software, the developer of which they are not. According to the new version of the Tax Code, such companies do not receive any tax preferences, despite the fact that the installation and maintenance of such software may require significant intellectual resources, the Association of Computer and Information Technology Enterprises said earlier.
«[В 2021 г. в результате налогового маневра в IT-отрасли] companies working on the simplification have suffered quite a lot. These are partners, whose sales volume in our country, as well as in other market players, reaches 50%, ”says Anton Ponomarev, director of the corporate business department at Eset. Now such partners continue to sell foreign software, earning much less due to the introduction of VAT. A small part of them switch to domestic software, and some partners leave the market, says Ponomarev. At the end of 2021, the number of Eset partners in Russia decreased by 1,500 to 13,500 legal entities and individual entrepreneurs, says Ponomarev.
Roadmap for the IT industry
On September 9, 2021, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin approved the second package of measures to support the IT industry. It is a roadmap entitled “Creating additional conditions for the development of the information technology industry” and includes 62 events. The first part of the plan includes 20 events aimed at leveling the business environment for Russian and foreign global companies, as well as system-wide measures to support the information technology industry. Among them, the preparation of proposals for the introduction in Russia of a digital tax on global companies, taking into account the approaches that are discussed at the OECD site, the development of a bill to attract and return IT specialists and companies, including with the issuance of concessional mortgages and concessional lending, the creation of a digital residency institute empowering digital attachés.
The second package will help simplify the path of IT companies to the Russian consumer, Shadayev said. Three measures of tax incentives are aimed at this, which were coordinated with the Ministry of Finance, he reported to Putin. The first measure will allow companies to pay lower income tax when introducing domestic artificial intelligence solutions. The second provides for the possibility of accelerating the depreciation of the Russian “iron” by 3 times. And the third measure will allow the regions to introduce an investment tax deduction for the costs associated with the implementation of Russian developments.
In addition, the plan contains 42 special measures to support the information technology industry. Among them are measures aimed at supporting domestic solutions for business, electronic medical services, domestic office software and operating systems, solutions in the field of artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet of things, the production of domestic computer games and Russian professional video content.
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