Businesses To Be Relieved Off Tax Related Fines And Late Payments

By Gajtis Bejleri
TIRANA, July 11 – Businesses will not have to pay their fines and late payment fees in years for not paying their tax duties, said Finance Minister Ridvan Bode. The new draft, part of the fiscal amnesty towards private-owned businesses, will pass to the Council of Ministers to be approved.
However, Bose said, the draft itself is not a full amnesty; as it requires businesses to pay their tax duties within three months, in order to be excised from fines and late payment fees. According to the Finance Ministry, the debt in tax payments, fines and late fees totals ALL 40 billion, of which fines and late fees make up ALL 30 billion.
“Businesses will have three months time to pay their tax duties in order to be relieved from the fines and late payment fees which derived from not paying those taxes,” said Bode. “We are doing this to relieve those businesses, for them to be more competitive in the Albanian economy market.”
Further Bode declared that the Finance Ministry would also legalize parts of the assets of these firms. In fact, the fiscal amnesty and the assets legalization were two of the three requests businesses have made to the Ministry.
A third request was the lowering of the luxury tax for the oil importers. According to them, a lower import tax would mean lower consumer prices in the Albanian oil market. That latter request was rejected by the Finance Ministry, despite the fact that the oil prices are booming in the world markets. Oil importers are taxed by volume rather than price, which would make the global change in oil prices unaffected in terms of the local luxury tax, according to Bode.