These Are New Stakeholders In Wealth Tax During 2020!

The Director General of Taxes, Amel Abdellatif, announced the amendment to the list of those concerned with the wealth tax, which will become more realistic, through the Supplementary Finance Law for the year 2020, by not only limiting those who pay the property tax from owners of cars and real estate, but will also include the owners of many travel, and luxury restaurants as well as hotels and those who spent large sums without justifying the source of their expenses, as she affirmed.

“Whoever declares his entrants and is obliged to pay the wealth tax in congratulations to him, while the rest will be subject to accountability,” she said.

Director General of Taxes, Amel Abdellatif revealed, during her hearing before the Finance and Budget Commission of the National People’s Assembly (APN), on Tuesday, to respond to the commission’s concerns regarding the supplementary finance law for the year 2020, that her institution’s endeavor is to expand the tax base during the year 2020, through wide circulation of digitization.

On the complete tax information, she said, “There is a group of people that we know are evading taxes, but we have no details on the amount of deals they undertake, so we will seek to generalize digitization, so that all necessary information will be available in our hands,” as she put it.

The tax director general also referred to the wealth tax whose name had been changed, from the property tax to the tax on wealth, referring notably to natural persons residing in Algeria, who did not possess property according to the elements of their livelihood, confirming that these people would be subject to the wealth tax, because their expenses are not justified by authorized income, stressing that these people do not own property despite the financial wealth they enjoy, and they are satisfied with renting to evade the tax, adding that the wealth tax pot will be determined according to the value of the pot of the standard of living that will be determined by Article 98 of the Direct Tax Law, in addition to returning to the ascending scale of the payment of wealth tax, which starts from 0.1 and extends to 1 percent.

Among the exemptions to the wealth tax, according to the Tax Director, is the exemption for the value of the main housing except for those whose value exceeds 45 billion centimeters, meaning that every residence is owned by a person residing inside or outside the wealth tax, except for those who reside in housing that exceeds or reaches a value of 45 One billion centimeters, in addition to the exemption of leased real estate.

This procedure, she noted, is to encourage the use of resources, not only just to store them, and also to eliminate the housing crisis and the phenomenon of vacant housing, knowing that in the event of leasing the property, the landlord will be obligated to pay another tax, and therefore he is exempted from the wealth tax.

The movable wealth tax allocated for furnishing, jewelry, gold, precious stones and minerals was also exempted, due to the difficulty of ascertaining it and knowing its size.

The tax director General said: “We must be realistic, it is not possible to enter people’s homes and know the size of their furniture or the size of jewelry”, while checking out their expenditures and asking them to be justified with certain incomes, then obliging them to pay the tax will be easier as a first stage, with the possibility of the tax on wealth being subject to amendment in the future to include these matters.

The tax director General added, according to leaks obtained by “Echorouk” from the APN’s Finance Commission, that reducing the state’s expenditures will force the taxes to raise their incomes during the current year, and this will not be by imposing new taxes, but rather by expanding the tax base by generalizing digitization and expanding the “tax collection” portal notably by collecting tax information about the taxpayers, and knowing their real business number, through the use of the institutions that these taxpayers are customers with, adding: “These people, if they do not justify their business number, will be obligated to pay the tax and will be forced to do so”.

Regarding the size of tax evasion, the Tax Director General stated that there is no accurate figure on the amount of money that was supposed to enter the public treasury from taxes, and that it was not entered due to evasion, noting that these numbers relate to the black market, and cannot be counted, in return urgent measures will be taken to contain them, she underlined .