The recent tax policy paper* assesses reports on tax benefits in Ukraine in the context of best reporting practice standards and identifies directions for their improvement.
An important stage in the implementation of the concept of tax expenditures in the budget process is the preparation and publication of reports on tax expenditures, the quality of which largely determines the effectiveness of their use in the process of budget management.
Problem statement
In the absence of a single format of reports on tax expenditures, there are significant differences in their quality in different countries of the world, which indicate the need to improve them in most countries. Despite the fact that the specific tasks to be solved in the process of improving the reporting in each country are different, the requirements based on the generalization of the best practices of tax expenditures reporting in the OECD countries can be used as guidelines.
The purpose of the article is to assess reports on tax benefits, which are losses of budget revenues, in Ukraine in the context of best reporting practice standards and to identify directions for their improvement.
Methods
General scientific methods of cognition were used: comparative and structural-functional analysis; critical analysis, analogies and theoretical generalization.
Results
Based on the results of the analysis of reports on tax benefits in Ukraine, it was established that both in name and format (submission of reports only in the form of tables and the absence of textual, analytical part) and completeness (absence of information in the reports on many qualitative dimensions of tax expenditures – their type, policy objectives, beneficiaries, estimation method, etc. as well as retrospective and forecast estimates of their value) they do not meet the standards of best reporting practice, are not sufficiently informative, which narrows the possibilities of their use in the process of budget management and indicates the need for their gradual improvement.
Conclusions
Proposals for improving the reports on tax expenditures in Ukraine are substantiated: at the first stage, by preparing the textual part of the report, as well as filling its tabular part and Directories of tax benefits with quality information; at the second stage – by reflecting in the reports information on data sources and methods of estimating the cost of each tax expenditure, as well as expanding the time range of the data provided on the basis of including retrospective and forecast estimates of tax expenditures in the reports.
*Best practices of tax expenditure reporting and the need for their implementation in Ukraine / A. . Sokolovska, L.Rainova// Фінанси України. – 2022. – № 10. – C. 7-33. Ukr. https://doi.org/10.33763/finukr2022.10.007