The Relevance of Improving the Legal Framework for Penal Sanctions and Their Accounting

Abstract

The subject of the researchis the procedure for imposing penalties on business entities.The relevanceof the paper lies in the fact that nowadays there is an urgent need to streamline the current legislation in the part of establishing the responsibility of organizations for breach of tax legislation, especially for lesser breaches punishable by minor fines usually appealed against by organizations involved thereby overloading the work of courts.The purpose of the researchwas critical assessment of individual legislative provisions relating to the imposition of minor fines on legal entities doing business in disputable situations, cases of which are often brought on to courts on the initiative of the heads of organizations. Judicial practice on them is not uniform. Regarding identical cases, some district arbitration courts decide in favor of business entities, while others support claims of tax authorities. Nor is the Russian Ministry of Finance always consistent in explanations on these issues in its official letters. In a number of cases, they happened to change their point of view regarding the fine imposing procedure for a quite opposed position. Therefore, there is a need to clarify certain rules of imposing fines on legal entities following the results of a field tax audit as well as for breach of contractual obligations.It is concludedthat the current tax legislation is imperfect in the part of imposition of penal sanctions. It is proposed to introduce a special provision about the penalty charged on the management of legal entities who loose disputable law breach cases in court followed by imposition of a minor fine. The procedure for accounting fines, penalties for breach of contractual obligations in corporate tax calculations is considered and its shortcomings are revealed. A new procedure for the accounting of penalties is proposed.