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The Tax Administration has already done what it announced and proved that there are no more jokes with her. Solutions for unpaid taxes and contributions on wages began to reach the addresses of citizens working for employers abroad from Serbia.
The freelancer who worked through Upvork, the world’s leading platform for working over the Internet, received the decision to pay 20 percent tax, 25.5 percent PIO and 10.3 percent care which are prescribed fees for payments from abroad, which are calculated as income for the previous four years. His tax solution was announced by the Online Workers Association and Startit.
The fiscal control of this freelancer, who makes money creating video games for mobile phones, began in June of this year. Then, ex officio, the procedure for determining the income tax was initiated based on payments of foreign money to accounts in foreign currency. According to the document, “the interests are calculated from the date of arrival of the tax obligation until September 21, 2020.” Thus, in addition to the calculated tax, you must pay interest for a period of four years.
Milan Pogačar from the Online Workers Association tells “Politika” that they have received four or five of these solutions. They demand that the collection of taxes and contributions to people who received foreign currency remittances from abroad be stopped, explaining that all are people who obtained income from abroad, whether they worked for a foreign employer, or that it was an online sale .
According to the data of the National Bank of Serbia, there are 750,000 of them, that is, many of them received foreign currency remittances from abroad until June. Although it is estimated that there are more than 100,000 of them.
– We demand any suspension of collection and start of procedures until the end of the negotiations with the Ministry of Finance and the Tax Administration. We ask that these solutions not be implemented for various reasons. Because, for example, not only interest is calculated but also contributions, although they should not be. Because in 2019 the Law of Obligatory Social Security for People was approved, where the self-employed who could pay taxes and contributions were recognized for the first time. The tax can be legally calculated backwards for five years, but the law cannot be applied retroactively, Pogačar says.
It coincides with the assessment of the Center for Public Policy Research that the average income of the self-employed is around 80,000 gross per month for men and 60,000 dinars for women. According to their assessment, even if the smallest tax debt is in question, based on the most favorable non-taxable base of 50 percent, the self-employed Serbian owes a significant amount. If, for example, they earned an average of 80,000 dinars gross per month in a year, they would be obliged to pay taxes and contributions in the best of cases, around 270,000 dinars per year (2,300 euros).
However, some freelancers earn much more than this average. Just visit the site, which deals with earnings analysis on social media, and make sure that some Serbian YouTubers earn $ 15,000 and more per year through this platform. The most popular with more than a million followers earn between $ 618,000 and $ 860,000 a year. These are the maximum amounts Serbian YouTubers earn. Most earn much less and they explain it themselves in the videos they post.
When asked how he explains this, Pogačar replied that he thinks a good chunk of YouTubers are in legal trade flows.
– If any of them had higher incomes, they entered the legal course of business either as a lump sum or founded d. about. about. If they didn’t, they are committing a serious violation. When we talk about freelancers, we are not talking about millionaires, but about people who earn between 300 and 400 dollars a month on the Internet – Pogačar emphasizes.
In these days suggestions have been heard that in the future progressive tax rates should be introduced for the self-employed and that income should not be taxed up to a certain amount.
Milica Bisić, a tax expert and professor at the FEFA faculty, says that it is not possible to introduce a scale only for one category of taxpayers and not for another. She believes that it is not a solution to introduce some special tax for someone who does not pay taxes all the time, and it was necessary. What would that tax base be called? He asks. This is income that is earned through an independent activity.
– That the autonomous activity does not have to be registered and that does not constitute an infringement in terms of the way in which the activity is carried out. But it is not possible to invent a special form of taxation just for that kind of independent activity. If there is an attempt to change the tax system, care must be taken about how it will affect other taxpayers. Now it is not possible that they are not taxed 200 euros per month and that a lesser amount is taxed by an employee of the company. The amount of non-taxable salary in Serbia is 16,300 dinars. It would not be correct from the point of view of the fairness of fiscal policy if equal winners paid taxes unequally, Bisić believes.
The fact that the Tax Administration has just woken up does not justify that taxpayers do not pay taxes. Our interlocutor explains that in the tax system there is the possibility of requesting a deferral of tax payment. But it does not exist for such a massive situation because it implies that a certain taxpayer at some point could not set aside the amount that he had to pay and that he submitted a request for deferred payment.
– What could be a solution for this specific situation is to define a suitable reprogramming procedure. That is, for two years to define the deferred payment and for those two years there is interest for that delay. If we take into account that they have not paid taxes for five years, to extend their term, it is possible to create a new framework that makes it easier for them to pay. Therefore, a more favorable payment than that provided by the existing system could be considered. The situation itself reminded them that they had to pay taxes, and it is not an idea to destroy them financially, Bisić says.
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