Member Article

Karanović & Nikolić is pleased to announce the election of one of its Partners, Tanja Unguran, to the position of AmCham Serbia's Chair of the Finance & Tax Committee. The Finance & Tax Committee, as one of the seven total AmCham Committees including those in charge of Combating Grey Economy, Healthcare Systems, Corporate and Business Law, Human Resources, Labour Task Force, and Real Estate Task Force, is tasked with improving the business environment via atwo-year agenda. The work of the committees comprises from producing position papers and suggesting processes, rules and regulations, all of which pertain to the general advocacy focus by working with the Board of Governors and AmCham Executive Team. Another important function of the Committee Heads is to interact with key decision and policy makers and implementing authorities, as well as communicating with the media.

As proven by her win in the voting process, Tanja's candidacy was met with widespread support, and we hereby present the main goals of her agenda proposal for the Finance & Tax Committee:

1) Overall goals:

• Improve the capacity of the Administrative Court to adjudicate tax disputes.
• Create a specialised tax department within the Administrative Court
• Building on the capacity of personnel for tax matters in the Office of Public Prosecutor, Tax Police and criminal courts
• Transferring tax appeals to a separate judicial body- Introduction of suspensive effect of appeal against first-instance resolutions.

2) Address non-transparent processes for changes in tax laws and accompanying tax regulations through:

• Establishing a system of an open, organised and transparent process of public debate on both tax laws and tax regulations
• Establishing a regular, open and organised process where interested parties may communicate important problems in existing legislative solutions to the MinFin and Tax Administration

3) Address transparency, simplicity and predictability of the tax system, via removal and/or re-classification of parafiscal charges

4) Address inconsistencies by:

• Establishing regular and structured channel of communication between AmCham and Tax Administration
• Making the internal instructions and guidelines in the Tax Administration publicly available
• Improvement and strengthening of the existing system of binding opinions of the MinFin
• Simplification and unification of existing VAT regulations
• Creating legal grounds for MinFin to issue binding tax regulations in other areas (corporate income tax, and personal income tax).