Premier says fiscal legislation should be toughened up

Prime Minister Zinaida Grecianyi considers that the fiscal legislation should be toughened up. Therefore, she asked officials of the Ministry of Economy and Trade and of the Ministry of Finance to formulate relevant proposals. The request was made while the Cabinet was examining the Parliament’s draft decision to approve the report on the fulfillment of the state budget for 2007, Info-Prim Neo reports. Grecianyi said that the measures aimed at toughening up the fiscal legislation taken after the amnesty do not seem sufficient for some of the businessmen. According to the Premier, though debts of over 3 billion lei have been cancelled as part of the economic liberalization reform, some of the economic entities continue to collect debts to the budget, while fiscal evasion is not yet a phenomenon of the past. The Prime Minister also considers that the budget’s expenditure part is not adequately fulfilled. About 196 million lei of the spending planned for 2007 was not requested, at a time when the institutions financed from the budget accumulated accounts payable of 66 million lei for the carried out works. At the same time, during the first three months of this year, the ministries and other authorities managed to ask already half of the expenditure planned for the whole year. The revenues and expenditure plans should be strictly observed. But the Premier warned, “friendly-like” as she said, that the unused resources will not be given back to the institutions the next fiscal year. At the same time, she said that she is satisfied with the fulfillment of the state budget for 2007 on the whole. “The largest part of the economic entities perceived the economic liberalization reforms and the diminishing of the fiscal pressure as a sign that they should step up the investment activity. Despite the drought that caused considerable damage to the Moldovan economy, the revenues to the state budget for 2007 rose by 26% (2.9 billion lei). The incomes to the national public budget increased by 4.4 billion lei,” Grecianyi said. The state budget revenues for 2007 came to 14.058,600 billion lei, while the expenditure to 14.257,100 billion lei. The budget deficit was 198.5 million lei or 0.2 % of the GDP, as opposed to the projected 0.5%.