Tax decentralization under local government reform conditions

Abstract

The primary objective of the paper is to investigate the main directions of decentralization reform, trends in local budget revenues in Ukraine, to assess the impact of decentralization reform on the structure and composition of local budgets financial resources, to identify the ways of their optimization. The main components of decentralization reform, the main practical results of territorial and fiscal decentralization in Ukraine are formulated in this paper. Analysis of the development of voluntary territorial communities association in the country during the last five years is carried out. The principles of public administration and the development of normative regulation of local self-government, voluntary association of territorial communities and their cooperation are investigated. It is determined that the practical result of administrative-territorial decentralization is to ensure the creation of new capable territorial entities – united territorial communities. The practical result of tax decentralization is the increase of financial capacity of the united territorial communities. The dynamics of the share of local taxes and fees in own revenues of the general local budgets fund is considered, special attention is paid to such national tax as personal income tax. The dependence of local budgets on transfers from the state budget is noted. And all this on the basis of achievement the ratio of state and local budget revenues of most EU countries is 50:50. The directions of reducing the risk of financial unreliability of local governments under COVID-19 conditions are determined. The difficulties of tax administration of large taxpayers; the main factors determining the size of the shadow economy in the country are investigated. There is no direct relationship between the level of taxation in Ukraine and the level shadow economy. The assessment of the extent of concealment and incomplete reporting of domestic businesses according to the survey in the framework of the SHADOW project is made. The consequences of increasing shadow economy share in the country are determined. The experience of several European countries in personal income taxation is studied, the peculiarities of granting the right to apply the social tax benefit from the personal income tax is determined. Recommendations for optimizing the taxation of individuals in terms of taxation of dividends are provided in this paper.