TIRANA, Sept. 21 – As a nationwide campaign against informality and tax evasion is underway, thousands of businesses, the majority of which small enterprises, have rushed to comply with tax authorities in the past few weeks while hundreds of others have started protesting opposing what they call ‘drastic measures’ that will take them to bankruptcy.
Hundreds of business owners in the northern Albanian city of Shkodra took to the streets last weekend in the first protest against the nationwide campaign against informality since its launch in early Sept. 2015.
“We support the fight against informality, but not drastic measures against businesses,” said Alfred Tukaj, the head of the association of independent trade unions in Shkodra, calling on the Albanian government to reflect on the difficult social and economic situation of local businesses who cannot afford buying the costly cash registers.
“In civilized world, cash registers have a modest price or are given free of charge because it is the government’s duty to collect the taxes of Albanians and not the other way round,” he said.
Protests against penalties imposed by tax inspectors in the first three weeks of the nationwide campaign continued on Monday in the cities of Elbasan and Kavaja, in two separate protests by hundreds of local traders.
“We cannot be classified as small businesses. We cannot afford buying cash registers because our daily turnover has dropped,” local Kavaja traders were quoted as saying.
Some 600 groups of tax inspectors backed by police officers have started carrying out field inspections in a bid to give an end to widespread informality, estimated at around 30 percent of the country’s GDP.
The operation has caused concern among businesses, which face heavy fines and seizure of goods, should they be found in breach of regulations.
Finance Ministry data shows a record 11,000 businesses, the overwhelming majority of which previously operating informally, registered in the first 18 days of September compared to 4,422 last August when government announced the launch of a nationwide campaign against tax evasion.
The tax administration says it carried out more than 36,000 field inspections during the Sept. 7 to 18 period identifying violations in 11 percent of businesses mostly with cash registers, lack of invoices for the stock goods and uninsured workers.
The Albanian government says it targets collecting about 330 million dollars from the nationwide campaign which will last 300 days in a similar operation to the electricity campaign to curb massive thefts and collect accumulated unpaid bills which has brought an extra 100 million euros to the state coffers since its launch in late 2014.
Experts say that similar to the electricity campaign which cut the consumption of Albanian households, the new campaign is expected to affect both consumption and employment in the short-term because of the closure of hundreds of small family-owned businesses which used to operate informally.
