11:11,

YEREVAN, MAY 31, ARMENPRESS. The government has returned 146 billion drams of value added tax (VAT) to economic entities in 2021, compared to the 60 billion drams in 2017, Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan said while presenting the 2021 state budget performance report at the joint session of parliamentary standing committees.

“We had an unprecedented taxes-GDP figure, when we registered the 22.7% of the GDP in the form of tax revenues. In the medium-run we have a task to raise this figure to 25%. Of course, this will not be easy, also in the background of reducing the tax provisions, but we have put this task and must try to solve it”, the PM said.

As for the 146 billion drams returned in VAT to businesses, the PM said that in case of export VAT is returned to economic entities.

“Debit funds emerge in the domestic turnover due to the peculiarities of VAT. And in 2021 we returned 146 billion drams to the economic entities. In 2017 the VAT return comprised 60 billion drams, we increased the VAT return by 140% compared to 2017”, the PM added.

As of January 1, 2018, the government owned a VAT debit of 125 billion drams to businesses. “When the new Tax Code was adopted in 2017, the government said they put aside the previous debts and will not address it. In 2019, when we were already overfilling the budget revenues, we decided to return the overdue VAT debits existing since the first days of independence. In other words, this was, in fact, a hopeless debt which we returned to economic entities”, he said.

He said they couldn’t not do it, but they considered the state’s reputation as the most important factor. He said that the government planned that time to return 56 billion drams in debt, but actually it returned 42 billion drams because many companies have been dissolved. Pashinyan said that there is practically no problem in Armenia that has existed for 30 years. And if there is a VAT debit debt, it means the economic entity has not yet managed to apply to get it within a month.