The deputies of the NA Civil Contract Faction Babken Tunyan and Narek Zeynalyan propose an addendum to the RA Tax Code.
“We are solving an important problem with the initiative: It affects hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens. It refers to the rules applied during the technical inspection. Today, when a citizen takes a car for a technical inspection, the system checks whether that person has property tax obligations for the given car or not. If the citizen has not paid the property tax of the given year, then, according to the relevant wording of the law, we force the citizen to pay the property tax of the given year in full,” the co-author of the draft Babken Tunyan noted.
According to the MP, combining the property tax with the technical inspection process was a toolkit for ensuring the collection of the property tax.
According to the authors of the initiative, it would be fair for the citizen to pay the current obligation or the debt of previous years. The new regulation will refer only to the fulfillment of tax obligations of previous years.
According to the MP, there are cases when the citizen has to pay the property tax for the whole year at the beginning of the year, but later alienates the car and goes through various paperwork processes in order to return the overpaid amount. According to Babken Tunyan, the authors elaborated the initiative together with the colleagues of the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure.
The law will enter into force on January 1, 2025.
“The Government considers the policy and the logic behind the draft to be acceptable and has no principled objections to the draft,” the co-rapporteur, the RA Deputy Minister of Finance Arman Poghosyan underlined. The Deputy Minister proposed to debate the issue of the possibility of regulation by which during the technical inspection not only the property tax of the previous year or years is paid, but also the property tax for the completed months of the current year until the date of the technical inspection. The Government also presented editorial proposals.
Referring to the Government’s proposal to pay the property tax every month, Babken Tunyan mentioned that he is not opposed to providing such an opportunity in principle, however, according to him, it should not be mandatory, but on a voluntary basis.
The MP proposed to debate this issue during the period from the first to the second reading. The Government representative accepted the proposal.
The issue was endorsed by the Committee.