Azernews.Az

By Aynur Jafarova

Azerbaijan has announced tax policy priorities in the draft concept of socio-economic development for 2014 and the next three years, which is currently being considered in parliament.

According to the document, Azerbaijan intends to establish Tax Ombudsman Institute in the near future. In addition, establishing institutions for private tax consultation is among the priorities.

The other priorities of the tax policy include the improvement of personnel training by using modern methods of education, increasing international cooperation and integrating the tax legislation into the international tax system, the expansion of coverage and the improvement of electronic services, and the improvement of fiscal and regulatory functions of the tax policy.

Georgia, Australia, Canada and Britain have already established Tax Ombudsman Institutes and this process is underway in Kazakhstan.

Another priority of the country's tax policy is the introduction of real estate tax in Azerbaijan.

Real estate tax will be applied on the basis of property and land taxes. At the same time, the government intends to implement the system of calculating taxes on the basis of market prices.

Besides property and land taxes, Azerbaijan uses seven more types of taxes.

The draft concept also said that the share of net taxes on products and imports in Azerbaijan's GDP will rise from 6.1 percent in 2012 to 7.6 percent in 2017.

According to the forecast, this figure will be 6.6 percent in 2013, 6.9 percent in 2014, 7.3 percent in 2015, and 7.4 percent in 2016.

Real growth in net taxes is expected to reach 7.9 percent in 2013, 9.6 percent in 2014, 8.4 percent in 2015, 8.8 percent in 2016, and 8.4 percent in 2017.

The GDP generated by net taxes on products and imports will reach 3.63 billion manats in 2013, 4.05 billion manats in 2014, 4.33 billion manats in 2015, 4.69 billion manats in 2016, and 5.14 billion manats in 2017.

The official exchange rate for October 28 is 0.7844 AZN/USD.

Furthermore, Azerbaijan plans to start applying the system of preliminary filling out of tax declarations.

According to the draft concept, in order to eliminate difficulties in filling out tax declarations by taxpayers, the declarations will be partially filled out by the tax bodies on the basis of the available data.

The declarations will be filled out with the application of high technologies and then will be sent to the e-mail address of the taxpayer. The taxpayer only needs to check the data in the declaration and then approve them. If the taxpayer finds any mistakes, he/she has to show the necessary documents to the tax bodies.

The Azerbaijani government also plans to expand enforcing partnership agreements between the tax bodies and the taxpayers.

The taxpayers in Azerbaijan annually spend 214 hours on filling out tax declarations and paying taxes, which is 4.7 times less than in 2007.

The indicators are cited in the Doing Business 2013 report. According to the report, the number of annual payments this year has halved to 18.