During the recent days the governmental party has been advertising its initiative in the framework of the pre-election campaign. Armenians who failed to pay land and property taxes from 1996 through 2007 will have their debts completely written off, according to a bill approved by the government. The bill drafted by several parliament deputies from the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) would also introduce a partial tax amnesty for such debts incurred in 2008-2010. It turns out that this bill is not so much the initiative of the RPA and is mostly brought up by the government. Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan estimated the total amount of the debts which the government would be able to forgive at around 43 billion drams. “This is an extremely important legislative initiative by the Republican Party’s parliamentary faction,” Sarkisian told ministers. “Our villagers constantly raised this issue during our visits to the regions.” “The tax burden on agriculture will considerably ease as a result,” he added. However, in the section of legislation of the NA official website when we find the law on property tax, we also see the author of the bill, which reads, “RA government.” When the bill is submitted and presented by MPs then we can see their names at the bottom. This means that officially the author of the bill is the government. In order to get ensured it would be enough to visit NA website at http://www.parliament.am/drafts.php?sel=introduction&lang=arm. Of course, for the sake of fairness we should mention that the RPA faction has come up with a somewhat similar initiative with different content in 2009, which was much more modest. The initiative of the RPA on the bill on property tax only related to the property tax liabilities and not only the main sum but the waiver of fines and penalties. However, in 2009 the government did not approve this bill and offered to edit it or review the fines and penalties from the period of 2002. Perhaps the campaign officers have remembered this initiative and by slightly “exaggerating” it, decided to present it as an RPA initiative. Indeed, we may argue that as a whole there is no big difference because in Armenia the government and RPA are almost identical. The funny thing is that the NA RPA faction has been doing plagiarism by stealing the initiative of their Republican Prime Minister. This means that the RA government has presented a draft, which the RPA ascribed to itself and is now presented as an RPA initiative on part of Tigran Sargsyan. However, this is not the only absurd part of the mentioned bill. Besides the violation of the copyright it is full of other question marks.
