Every fifth employee of the National Revenue Agency (NRA), and more precisely – of its headquarters in Sofia, will have to leave their positions. Finance Minister Peter Tchobanov ordered the National Revenue Agency to carry out 20% cuts in its central administration. The dismissed staff will be aimed at strengthening the control functions of the agency, the Minister announced on Wednesday during a meeting of the Council of Ministers.
The BANKER weekly immediately asked the Executive Director of the NRA Boyko Atanassov if he was surprised there by this personnel slicing. He replied that this measure had been previously talked over with the Minister.
„We are currently working with 500 employees, which means that the staff will need to be reduced by 100 employees. However, they will not be dismissed or made redundant. Each of them will be offered a place in the Territorial Directorate of NRA – Sofia.“ This way Mr. Atanasov explained the situation, adding that objective approach would be deployed. It is the responsibility of the respective directorate to assess the performance of each employee on the basis of this the people with lower scores will have to leave.
The report on implementation of the budget last year made it clear that tax revenues for 2013 were not collected in full and the arrears come to nearly half a billion levs against what was initially budgeted. This in turn led Prime Minister Oresharski to say a few days ago he was not happy with the work of the NRA and Customs Agency to which he will direct his attention this year.
Against this background, the NRA announced that they over-fulfilled their plan for the revenue collection. The paradox for having uncollected taxes and simultaneously overachievement of revenue plan of the Agency was explained by NRA with the „method of accounting“, which was different from that of the Ministry of Finance.
Commenting on the revenue part of the budget for 2013, Peter Tchobanov said on Wednesday that „the total underachievement of the revenue side is below 200 million levs, not 500 million levs.“
“ There are several things that influence the failure to collect tax revenues. Firstly, in 2013 the refunds on canceled acts that were improperly imposed by tax authorities amounted to 150 million levs. These are acts issued in previous years. Another factor for failure to collect tax revenues are the 90 million levs in interest calculated for unpaid taxes which within 2012 where the recorded as tax revenue but in 2013 were reported as non-tax revenue, “ he continued explaining.
The explanation for uncollected excise duties is that this was due to reduced consumption of excisable goods.
According to Mr. Tchobanov the country will not have to update the budget because of the low income threshold, from where this year’s performance starts off, whatever the concerns of the opposition may be.
„Preliminary results for January show that we have collected more revenue than in January 2013, and the deficit in January this year will be lower than the deficit, registered in January 2013,“ he said.
The BANKER
