Each year, Albanian citizens who earn more than 2 million lekë per year have to declare their income as required by the tax office. According to the law for income declaration, the deadline to fill out the application is April 30. The declaration includes revenues from wages, shares, bank interests, royalties, rent, lottery, gifts, or other acquired income from abroad.
In April 2016, Monitor magazine published that over 2015, only 6,321 declarations have been submitted to the tax office, while a year before, in 2015, there were fewer, 700.
This means that in Albania there are fewer than 6,500 people with yearly income over 2 million lekë. This is a number that is hard to believe.
According to INSTAT, until 2015 there were at least 103 thousand people registered as small business holders, 1/3 of them with TVSh, meaning that they earned between 5 to 8 million lekë per year. There are also at least 25 thousand capital firms, 85 thousand credit cards, and there are around 420 thousand cars in circulation. Every year, at least 2 thousand new cars and 30 thousand used ones are imported into the country.
The actual numbers make it hard to believe that only 6,500 people in the country earning more than 2 million lekë.
Is it still possible that a small group of people control all income earned by fixed assets in Tirana?!
The most ridiculous and hypocritical part of the data is the application of the progressive tax on employees, systematically required and propagandized by the Socialist Party, harming with the public and private employees, most likely the ones who are the most educated, and are unable to commit tax evasion, because the employer applies taxes on earnings at its source.
The end result is that employees with a higher income in most cases pay more taxes than their owners of the companies and institutions they work for.
If the government is really applying a progressive tax, it should do so to all forms of income (wages, rent, royalties, financial interests, dividends, etc.) and to do this it should realistically engage the system of yearly income declarations, because as we have noticed, applying a progressive tax only on income from employment is unfair.
Until this moment, the government, in order to meet the needs of state budget, has forced the Albanian taxpayer to pay taxes over fake amounts (but prescribed by the law) creating many twists and turns in the market, like fake declarations for property values, goods, rents, and even lower amounts on companies’ invoices.
This has happened as a result of the inappropriate management of taxes, though it is in the end primarily the result of a political will to spread unjustifiable propaganda, while keeping the power to negotiate over the (non-)implementation of the standard for individual taxpayers, based on a selection that promotes corruption.
