Armenia to raise fines for large companies for inappropriate financial reporting

YEREVAN, January 22. /ARКА/. The National Assembly of Armenia has approved today in the first reading a set of amendments to the Tax Code, which propose to raise fines for large companies submitting financial reports in an improper form or not on time.
Deputy Finance Minister Arman Poghosyan noted that companies have begun to violate the deadlines for submitting documents more often, and according to the latest data, half of the approximately 500 companies have committed a violation.
Thus, he reported that 12% published financial reports are either without an auditor's report or not in full, and 38% did not publish them at all.
According to Poghosyan, this is due to the fact that the amount of the fine is significantly lower than the cost of the audit.
Thus, in the case of the first violation, a fine of 50 thousand drams is issued, and in case of failure to correct the identified errors within 30 days - 500 thousand drams, that is, a total of 550 thousand drams. At the same time, the average cost of an audit is approximately 6 million drams.
In connection with these changes, it is proposed to introduce a three-stage system of fines: in the case of the first violation, the fine will be 100 thousand drams, in case of the the second - 1.5 million drams, the third violation will incur 3 million dram fine. ($1 - 398.84 drams) -0-