For the first seven months of 2015, the Federal customs service (FCS) has assessed additional customs duties, charged fines in the amount of 5.6 billion rubles and expects that by the end of the year will be assessed not less than the last year of 7.3 bn (seven months of this year already amount to 7% more than for the same period), it follows from the answer of the official representative of the FCS Alexander Smelyakov on request . A group of experts under the leadership of Vice-speaker of the state Duma Nikolay Levicheva claims that TCF annually loses up to $40 billion, or 1.3 trillion roubles at the average rate for the year 2013 for which the calculation was. This is hundreds of times more than customs officers can assess additional annually as a result of available mechanisms.
Levichev believes that if the FCS has adopted was developed by experts the methodology for the evaluation of the customs losses ( wrote about it on 24 September), the Russian budget could avoid a significant portion of future sequesters. But the FCS in the response called submitted by Deputy assessment “populist exaggeration” and proposes to Refine the existing method of estimating the shortfall in income.
As previously reported , the working group with the participation of experts from Russian Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Deputy Nikolai Levicheva has calculated that total losses for the Russian budget shortfall of customs duties in 2013 alone could reach $40 billion by Experts with the calculations used data on trade FCS, IMF, WTO, UN, as well as data of the Central Bank. The calculations were performed as follows: data on exports/imports from Russia were compared with the corresponding data from the trading partners, the differences were adjusted by a factor to take into account the logistics costs, and then these data were multiplied by the weighted average amount of customs duties. In the calculations the losses of the experts used data for the year 2013, because they were “the most complete and updated” indicates one of the authors of the method, the head of the Institute of market problems, Russian Academy of Sciences Valery Tsvetkov. Data were then confirmed by data of the system of customs and banking currency control of the Central Bank.
In January—July 2015 FCS recovered customs payments and fines in the amount of 2,26 billion rubles, said the representative of the FCS. And in 2014 on the basis of operative materials of customs authorities instituted 1517 criminal cases, of which 465 — on the facts of evasion from payment of customs payments; in the first half of 2015 981 filed a criminal case. Just in 2014, TCF transferred to the Federal budget more than 7 trillion rubles.
According to the materials of the group Levicheva discrepancies between the data of the FCS on the import to Russia export from Russia and the corresponding data of countries — trade partners of reach for certain groups of goods of 50% and above. However, according to FCS, for the last ten years a direct difference, for example, data on imports and exports of the countries of its trading partners fell four times: from minus 28.2 per cent to minus 5.1% in 2013.
The current rules
Guidelines that are now used to identify differences, were adopted in 2008 a joint order of the FCS of Russia, Ministry of economic development and Rosstat. To conduct comparative analysis of data of external trade statistics as the primary sources of information used the electronic database of the International monetary Fund and the Federal customs service, in this case the comparison takes into account the ratio of logistics costs — transportation, loading and insurance of the goods. Now this coefficient is equal to 1,056. For countries with a common border with Russia (CIS countries, Baltic States, Finland), this factor is not applied.
“Our method can identify losses, including what product and who made out the passport of the foreign economic activity”, — said Tsvetkov. “In the conditions of difficult work on the budget, deciding to cut pensions, our job was to understand whether there are any other reserves to replenish the budget, he explains. — Our task was to evaluate the loss.” “If you take an imaginary exports — the difference between how much the exporters presented to the VAT refund and how many export deals were made, there is a difference of about $24 billion in 2013,” adds the President of Expert-analytical center for economic development Alexander Chuyev, who also worked on the new methodology. He noted that current guidelines do not allow you to analyze variances in individual groups of goods.
The methodological dispute
The FCS position is that you must take as a basis the existing methodology and modify it. The RAS method in the service is considered “incomplete” and do not take into account a number of features. When discussing “most of the proposals of the FCS of Russia were not taken into account”, according to the comments of the FCS. “We offered the basis to complement existing guidelines, which take into account methodological features of the statistics in different countries, affecting the magnitude of the differences, and tested in practice. This was rejected. The RAS method does not contain new ideas and approaches to the calculations, does not account for logistics of delivery of goods (often not the same exporting country and country of origin). She ignores doing statistics in different countries and not confirmed by expert calculations based on real figures,” reads the written reply of the FCS.
In particular, the FCS indicates that “for correct comparison” specialists increase the import of Russia on a number of variables, for example the cost of the vehicles imported by physical persons on customs pay-in slips, at the cost of bunker fuel purchased by Russian vessels in foreign ports, and reduce export volume of some countries by 2-5% due to the tendency to inflate the value of exports. “For example, Finland includes in its exports of medicines produced in India or in Germany. In Russia customs statistics, following the UN recommendations, the goods account in the country of origin as Indian or German. As a result, in 2013 the error between the Russian imports from Finland and Finland’s exports amounted to more than $1.7 billion In some cases appliances German brands, which is produced by Chinese enterprises and exported to Russia through Germany, Germany is included in their exports, and our statistics reflect their country of origin as imports from China”, — said in response to the TCF.
Accordingly, the number of deputies of the evaluation of the amount of foregone customs duties is the “populist exaggeration, not based on reliable methods of calculation,” says FCS.
Flowers acknowledges that these nuances, which lists the FCS, is really not taken into account in the calculations by the proposed method, but, according to him, no claim by the representatives of FCS at the meeting of the working group were not articulated. Alexander Chuev argues that part of the proposals of the FCS were taken into account. In particular, the calculations were also used IMF data, and we considered the correction factor. But experts in the methodology used the ratio of 1,087. He was selected after analysis of the data on divergence between exports and imports of the countries “big twenty”, including Russia. With an average discrepancy of 8%, indicates Chuev.
As previously reported , the methodology had to be submitted to the speaker of the state Duma Sergei Naryshkin. Chuev claims that this is done. sent a request to the device Naryshkin, to date no response has been received. Contact Nicholas Levicheva at the time of preparation of the material failed.
With the participation of Svetlana Bocharova
