As many as 377 parafiscal fees paid by companies and citizens have been detected in the country. A large part of them are in the municipalities, and many of the fees are doubled. However, a bigger problem than their price is the duration of a service. That is why digitization is necessary, but in order to implement it successfully, it is necessary to exchange information between institutions and municipalities and to centralize many services so that it does not happen that one municipality pays much more for what is paid less in another municipality.

These were the main conclusions of the panel discussion at the Economic Forum "Parafiscal duties - a small piece in the competitiveness puzzle", organized by the Institute for Economic Policies and Development "Finance Think".

Julian Vassallo, Deputy Head of the Delegation of the European Union to the RSM he said that work should be done to raise confidence in how the public's money is spent, and this is done with greater transparency and by opening the data.

– There should be greater optimization of parafiscal duties, but this does not mean that they should be abolished. For example, the environmental tax should be invested in visible environmental projects, from which the municipality and the citizens will benefit - said Vassalo.

The President of the Chamber of Commerce for Information and Communication Technologies - MASIT, Aneta Antova Pesheva, said research on parafiscal charges showed that while we often tie them to companies, "it turns out that citizens are the biggest victims."

– Digitization can be easily implemented. There are companies that have good engineers and it can be done quickly. But if we look at the municipality level, in all 80 municipalities there are only 3-4 such engineers. Otherwise, all documents should be digitized first. Then digitization also requires centralization. There cannot be one price for one duty in one city and another in another. And thirdly, the biggest problem is data exchange. Now we have 80 women in one country! Antova Pesheva said at the panel discussion.

Blagica Petreski, Chief Economist at Finance Think says that the next period is from 2019 and that compared to then the parafiscal charges to the central government have an increasing trend, although moderate. According to the research, 54 percent of the companies identified the company tax as a parafiscal charge. The utility fee for the use of streets, which is paid with the registration of the vehicles, as well as permits and licenses for the performance of the activity, is detected as a relatively high burden.

Minister of Economy Kreshnik Bekteshi emphasized that the process of systematization of these duties requires the adoption of acts that will provide the legal framework for the establishment, monitoring and supervision of duties of a non-tax nature.

- It is important to point out that the optimization of these fees is a process that should ensure fairness, taking into account the interests of businesses, but also taking into account a realistic assessment of the cost of certain services, bearing in mind that non-tax fees are income from which ensures the smooth functioning of certain institutions and state institutions - said Bekteshi.

The Minister of Finance Fatmir Besimi, who also attended the debate, supports this process, but reminded that often in practice there are double standards when it comes to any fees, so when a citizen's property is expropriated, then the price he receives as compensation is small, but when he pays property tax - then he talks about large amounts.

By the way, the Ministry of Economy has started working on the first 100 established parafiscal duties in order to optimize them.

What are parafiscal charges?

Parafiscal charges are part of non-tax charges to state institutions and local self-government units. At the same time, they should fulfill one of two conditions: they must not transfer any right to the payer, even though they do not represent a tax and do not provide any service (for example, stamp duty), or else they transfer some right to the payer or provide a service whose price exceeds the value many times over. of the service.