Who is avail of estate tax amnesty in Kazakhstan?

With the act signed on 5 July this year, it will take effect on 16 July. The amnesty rules are due to approved by the Kazakh Finance Ministry’s order and are about to circulated among all the State Revenue Departments.

“We’ve already approved the road map, with the State Revenue bodies conducting large-scale work on the tax amnesty rules so as to each citizen can make use of this campaign aimed at writing off penalties”, Kanat Baedilov, the Vice Finance Minister, told.

He dwelled on the statistic data on tax arrears of individuals and the amount of unpaid taxes as well as other obligatory payments to the budget.

As of 1 January 2019, 1 million 400 thousand people were tax indebted for the overall sum of 20.9 billion tenge, including the principal of 14.3 billion tenge and imposed penalties of 6.6 billion tenge, with 70% of the unpaid taxes for vehicles, 12% - for land (2.5 billion tenge) and 6.7% - for property (1.4 billion tenge).

The most number of tax debtors was found in Shymkent (148 thousand people), followed by Turkestan region (139), Zhambyl region (116) and Nur-Sultan (114). As for the most amounts of the debts, the following cities and regions were named: Almaty (5.5 billion tenge), Nur-Sultan and Mangystau region (each 2 billion tenge) and Shymkent (1.6 billion tenge).

“Since the beginning of this year, the state revenue bodies have conducted the huge preparatory work on a tax amnesty for individuals, including data verifications with the relevant bodies, an inventory of expired accounts for completeness and proper assessment so as to mainstream expired accounts of tax payers”, the Vice Finance Minister said.

In that context, the tax amnesty’s key measure is the possibility to write off tax debts of individuals who are not individual entrepreneurs but have debts related to entrepreneurial activity. Such debts were the result of the transition tax bodies from the local to the nationwide tax information system in 2002-03, with 16 thousand individuals having entrepreneurship-related debts for 700 million tenge, including the principal of 400 million tenge and penalties of 300 million tenge, as of 1 January this year.

He also briefly touched upon the mechanism of the tax amnesty.

The only condition for writing off tax penalties is the paid principal. Tax payers are not asked to reach out to the state revenue body as it will monitor the statues of individuals’ accounts on a daily basis and will made an appropriate decision once the principal is paid.

Adlet Seilkhanov