Companies will pay eco-tax in a new way

Authorities hope for increased payments

To implement the stricter law on the responsibility of manufacturers and importers for waste of goods and packaging, the Ministry of Natural Resources has prepared a new procedure for collecting an environmental fee - companies pay it when they cannot meet recycling standards on their own. However, according to experts, the department’s desire to retain the administration of fees under Rosprirodnadzor, which reports to it, which does not have this function, will not allow increasing the influx of money necessary to finance the state “garbage” infrastructure. This confirms the relevance of the discussion, which was curtailed after 2018, about the need for a unified mechanism for collecting non-tax payments instead of dispersing fiscal functions across disparate departments.

The Ministry of Natural Resources published on the portal for discussing draft regulations a draft government decree on a new procedure for collecting an environmental fee from companies - it must be paid by manufacturers and importers of goods that have not ensured their independent disposal. The Ministry states that many market participants did not fulfill their obligations either for recycling or for paying environmental fees - we recall that with forecasts for revenues of tens of billions of rubles per year, the actual amounts were 4–5 billion rubles. This situation has persisted for many years due to the long-term paralysis of the reform of the institution of extended responsibility of producers and importers for waste of goods and packaging. The “ecological” Deputy Prime Minister in the previous government, Victoria Abramchenko, intended to solve the problem, but it was not possible to reconcile the interest of the Ministry of Natural Resources in increasing revenues from environmental collection with the hopes of market participants for the development of independent recycling and the construction of a private system for collecting and processing waste.

As the Ministry of Natural Resources admitted a year ago, the ministry “fought for three years” for the new law on EPR in its wording, hoping “to use this money to create an infrastructure with waste.” In the new law, the possibilities for companies to independently dispose of goods were significantly limited (from 2026, importers will begin to provide bank guarantees, guarantees, or immediately pay an environmental fee when importing goods), reporting was expanded, and the responsibility for recycling packaging was completely transferred to its manufacturers to simplify the administration of fees. The process was also accompanied by a gradual increase in recycling standards, although the proposed increase in rates from January 1, 2024 by the Ministry of Natural Resources did not occur against the backdrop of objections from market participants.

Officially, the ministry insists that “the priority for the Ministry of Natural Resources is the actual disposal of waste, and not the payment of an environmental fee.”

Collection is the case when a company cannot physically comply with the standards for some reason,” and reminds that “the updated system of manufacturer responsibility for packaging put into circulation has been in effect for the first year,” and “which companies will independently dispose of produced packaging, and which ones will pay the recycling fee,” will become known only towards the end. The department avoided answering the question about planned revenues, without answering the question about whether Rosprirodnadzor has sufficient personnel and resources to administer fees.

The very procedure for administering the environmental fee, adopted to implement the new law on EPR, differs little from the versions of 2015 and 2018, when it did not provide even a third of the revenue expected from the environmental fee. The document still obliges 58 thousand manufacturers and 71 thousand importers from January 1, 2025 to independently calculate the environmental fee and pay it to Rosprirodnadzor by April 15.

De facto, we are talking about partially independent administration of collections by businesses: according to the Ministry of Natural Resources, this activity will cost companies an additional 350 million rubles. per year for accounting expenses, or 2.1 billion rubles. until 2030.

The Federal Service, as before, will have to jointly reconcile accounts and administer debts and overpayments of companies in conjunction with the federal treasury, including suing defaulters.

“Collection of the environmental fee, control over the completeness and timeliness of its payment by Rosprirodnadzor will be difficult, and the collection plan will be disrupted. Rosprirodnadzor cannot interfere in the economic activities of enterprises and conduct desk inspections, counter-analysis of documents, etc.,” predicts Sodnom Budatarov, a senior researcher at the Laboratory for Research on Sustainable Development Problems of the Institute of Economics and Public Administration of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. According to him, “these tasks should be assigned to the Federal Tax Service, developing and implementing a federal standard for accounting for waste and secondary resources, which will ensure the reliability of the information submitted and counter desk checks in case of detection of anomalies.”

Back in 2018, the Ministry of Finance envisioned just such a solution to the problem: duplication of collections of individual payments by different departments against the backdrop of the modernization of the Federal Tax Service looked like an anachronism and an inefficient use of resources. “Transferring the environmental fee to the status of a tax and transferring its administration to the Federal Tax Service will improve collection,” admitted then the director of the department’s revenue department, Elena Lebedinskaya. However, the discussion about non-tax payments 2015–2018 was never completed. Business demanded that the authorities limit the number of such fees and include them in the Tax Code to ensure stability and predictability of state requirements, but when discussing approaches to solving the problem, it turned out that significant differences in the nature of fees and groups of payers do not allow a systematic solution to the issue, and the timing of immersion in Tax codes for individual payments are constantly shifting. Thus, the Ministry of Finance assumed that the environmental fee would become a tax by 2020 - but even then it allowed for a “non-critical” shift to 2021, stating that “all payments are complex and ambiguous, and if we started with the recycling fee, it would not be any easier “, in the end, neither one nor the other happened.

Source: www.kommersant.ru