The State Duma introduces VAT for foreign IT-companies

Deputies of the State Duma prepared a bill according to which foreign companies providing electronic services will be subject to VAT. The authors of this bill are State Duma deputies Andrei Lugovoi from the LDPR and Vladimir Parakhin from the party "Fair Russia".

If this project is approved by the lower house, then foreign companies will be further taxed, which will also affect the supply of software and the sale of digital content such as e-books, audio tracks, films, photos and games. It also follows from the text of the bill that hosting services and the broadcast of advertising will be taxed.

According to one of the authors of the bill, Vladimir Parakhin, first of all it is aimed at eliminating the resulting inequality between foreign companies, which are the main suppliers of digital content in the Russian market and are exempted from VAT, and domestic players who are forced to pay tax. This situation forces Russian companies to register their business abroad in order to avoid additional expenses. Therefore, the deputies, instead of exempting domestic entrepreneurs from VAT and thus attracting them to develop Russian business, decided to make sure that in any case they could not escape the tax. Karen Ghazaryan, a leading analyst at the Russian Association of Electronic Communications, supports the same point of view, proposing to level the situation by abolishing the VAT for domestic companies.
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Leonid Levin, Chairman of the Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications, believes that this project "is relevant and corresponds to the current economic situation." At the same time, he notes the fact that as a result of such a bill, the prices for content may increase, which the end user will suffer from, so in the case of VAT, you need to be careful.