The regional Government House hosted a training seminar for individual entrepreneurs and organizations dedicated to the topic "Special procedure for initiating cases on tax crimes".

The urgency of the issue, according to the Commissioner for the Protection of the Rights of Entrepreneurs in the Moscow Region, Vladimir Golovnev, is due to the need to take preventive measures to prevent offenses.

"In March of this year, a federal law came into force allowing investigators to initiate criminal cases on tax crimes only on the basis of materials from tax authorities. What does it mean?

If earlier information from any sources (for example, reports from operatives, appeals from competitors and employees, information in the media, etc.) could become the reason for initiating a criminal case on crimes provided for in Articles 198-199.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, now only materials sent by tax authorities in accordance with the legislation on taxes and fees to resolve the issue of initiating a criminal case," Golovnev said.

The main speaker of the event was Vadim Zaripov, Head of the analytical service of the Pepelyaev Group Law Firm. In particular, he announced the statistics of cases of prosecution for tax crimes, noting that the number of offenses in the tax sphere has decreased by 8.5 times over the past 12 years, and the number of convicted entrepreneurs – by 3.2 times.

"The previous procedure did not allow taking into account the position of a specialized control body on issues in which not only facts are important, but also very complex regulation contained in the Tax Code," Zaripov said in his speech.

 – The term of appointment of on–site inspections is noticeably less (3 years, not counting the current one) than the statute of limitations (now under Part 2 of Article 199 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - 10 years), so in fact the statute of limitations on criminal cases will decrease sharply, which means that the number of criminal cases will inevitably decrease.

In addition, serious violations can be found during on-site inspections, and their number has been noticeably reduced in previous years. In 2021, 8000 of them passed (in 2020 – 6 thousand, taking into account the pandemic moratorium) for the whole country.

With this in mind, and also judging by the statistics of 2011-2014, when there was absolutely the same procedure, we can expect a significant decrease in the number of criminal cases. This will reduce the largely unjustified, artificially inflated threat of criminal prosecution of business, which is taking place now."

The seminar participants touched not only on the changes that have already come into force, but also discussed proposals that are in the works aimed at reducing administrative and criminal pressure on business.