In one of the previous releases of our newspaper we adverted to the taxes paid by the 325 greatest taxpayers of Armenia for the period of January-April 2009. Although the circulation of the products of these taxpayers was reduced by 1% but they started to pay 24% less taxes to the budget (social security payments, etc.). And this happened in the event when the other taxpayers, who had larger slump in their businesses (as the GDP slump in January-April of 2009 was 9.7%) reduced the amount of their paid taxes only by 11%. As of now the list of the 325 taxpayers and the amount of their taxes paid in January-April 2009 is already publicized. As the list of 325 taxpayers of Armenia shows the picture hasn’t changed for June 2009 either. If during the first 4 months of the year the greatest taxpayers tried not to reduce their circulation in the conditions of a 9.7% economic slump then in the line of the first 6 months of the current year their circulation was reduced by 6% in the event of 16.3% slump of the GDP. This means that we can say that in the whole world the negative impact of the global crisis face not only the small and medium businesses but the largest businesses (mostly) as well. However, this principle doesn’t work for our oligarchs. In the background of a great global crisis their businesses almost don’t suffer but the incomes slightly reduce. Nevertheless, our greatest taxpayers strangely enough (everybody knows why) reduce their taxes and social payments. Thus, in January-June 2009 the greatest taxpayers have paid the budget 81 billion AMD worth of taxes and other mandatory payments. By comparing this number to January-June months it turns out that they reduced their taxes by 24% compared to the same period of the last year. And this number is larger than the index of the first quarter of the budget tax reductions (18.2%). What about the rest of the greatest tax-payers? To what extent did they reduce their payments? In January-June of 2008 approximately 285 billion AMD worth of tax was paid to the state budget and for the same period of 2009 the amount of paid taxes was 233 billion AMD. After doing it turns out that the small and medium businesses paid respectively 179 and 152 billion AMD worth of taxes. These numbers show that all the other taxpayers have reduced their taxes by 15%. This confirms the opinion that gradually the task of filling the state budget is moved to the shoulders of the small and medium businesses. The tricky thing is that many of the small and medium businesses belong to the owners of large businesses, who by doing that avoid paying major taxes. Therefore, it is not surprising that some small medium businesses may rapidly raise the amount of their taxes as our oligarchs are gradually decreasing their paid taxes. In this background the statement of the premier Tigran Sargsyan made about a month and a half ago, according to which in the first quarter of this year the shade of the economy was reduced by 16%, seems at least odd. He probably finds the squeezing of the medium and small business a fight against the shade.
