Lenience for big debtors?

The Government yesterday discussed several solutions aimed to “ease” the burden of the economic agents holding large debts to the state budget.

According to one of these propositions, the companies that will have paid their dues for the current year by December 31, 2001 should benefit from cancellation of debts and penalties accumulated over the previous years.

The measure is supposed to aim at 86 state-owned companies monitored through the programme agreed upon with the IMF, but it is quite unlikely that they should be able to pay the entire dues owed for 2001 by the end of the year in order to benefit from penalty cancellation.

The private companies sharing the top of debtors with the state-owned companies may fare better. However, this is not the only variant, as the Finance Ministry has other solutions as well.

The Finance Ministry is trying to create a system to stimulate economic agents to pay their taxes by establishing a new order of payment. It actually means that budget duties for the current year are to be cashed first in order to prevent further arrears from accumulating.

Arrears stood at 51,000 billion ROL at the end of the first nine months of the year, down 25% against last year. This level observes the schedule of arrears’ cut included in the memorandum concluded with the IMF and according to which the arrears will amount to no more than 52,500 billion ROL by yearend.

The arrears are also set to decrease to 51,700 billion ROL by March 31, 2002.

On the other hand, the attempt to cut the arrears by rescheduling them is blocked by the same memorandum, which stipulates that the arrears that were rescheduled, namely the rescheduled amounts, including penalties, will not be considered a cut in arrears.