14.05.2021

Deputy Minister of Finance Violeta Lorer will be in charge of the budget sphere, Deputy Minister of Finance Vanya Stoyneva will be responsible for the areas of EU funds recovery, state aid and coordination of the Recovery Plan, Deputy Minister of Finance Monika Dimitrova-Beecher will perform tasks in the field of our country's accession to the euro area, the audit of EU funds, as well as the preparation of the programme for the debt policy of the Ministry of Finance, Minister of Finance Assen Vassilev announced the above today at a press conference where he presented his team. Also, starting from today, Rumen Spetsov is Executive Director of the National Revenue Agency and Pavel Tonev is Director of the Customs Agency. 

Minister Vassilev announced that the priorities of the new management of the revenue administrations would be to increase revenue collection, placing a special focus on large taxpayers and eliminating the terror exercised on small taxpayers, as well as on companies and their subcontractors that use public resources. The Minister of Finance announced data for the period 2017 – 2020, according to which only 55% of the amounts under the tax assessment notices issued by the NRA have been collected, with 45% not being collected – tax audits have resulted in receivables to the amount of BGN 4,029,846,000, out of which BGN 2,252,379,000 have been collected As part of his arguments for the changes in the NRA, Assen Vassilev said that the level of confirmability of the tax assessment notices was extremely low; out of all notices issued, only 66.5% have been fully or partially confirmed and according to the Minister this is a sign of the quality of the tax assessment notices. The Minister announced that in the next two months inspections would be made of companies with large amounts in cash and companies that systematically withdraw large sums of money; the inspections would refer to the availability of cash in the cash registers and the reasons for withdrawing such amounts, because “all companies that have such type of behaviour are part of a risk group”, Minister Vassilev is convinced. 

The priorities of the Customs Agency will include the OLAF's report on serious damages caused to the European budget – despite the measures taken so far, work will continue on this topic; in addition, yesterday the Ministry of Finance received a letter for potential recovery of EUR 55 million to the European budget.

The Ministry will work hard to update its debt policy for the coming months, Minister Vassilev said. In relation to the estimates for the elections, next Monday there will be clarity as to the summaries that the Ministry of Finance will make on the basis of the submitted requests for the necessary resources for expenditures of the institutions involved in the upcoming early parliamentary elections.

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