In the process of the anti-corruption expertise of the normative acts this week, the NAC found a number of contradictory provisions and corruption risks in the latest amendments of the Fiscal Code of the Republic of Moldova. They refer to the draft law that aims at reducing the VAT on the import of water filters and legislative initiative related to the fiscal regime of the natural persons, who act in the field of trading ferrous and non-ferrous metal wastes.

To be exact, the draft law on amending the share of taxes and duties imposed on the import of the devices on filtering and purifying water is intended to ensure the population access to quality drinking water with a number of corruption risks, that can harm the public interest, is shown in the expert report. The NAC experts consider that corruption threats appear because the law is not correlated with the state budgetary-fiscal policies and does not guarantee that lower VAT will bring the reduction of prices.

Therefore, the NAC recommends to assess the impact of the law on the society, so that it actually increases citizens' access to the machinery that ensures better quality water.  Otherwise, setting a reduced rate of the VAT for the categories of products may create the risk that the law can be interpreted in favor of a limited group of people, who are interested in importing and marketing such equipment.

At the same time, the experts of the Anticorruption Expertise Directorate of the NAC identified other loopholes, that might generate corruption manifestations, in the legislative initiative on the fiscal regime of natural persons in the field of trading ferrous and non-ferrous metal wastes.

The report has shown, that even if the draft law promotes the usage of electronic payment instruments, avoiding tax evasion and reducing economic activity in the field outside the activity regime, the provisions through which cash payments are made to the detriment of the transfer payments can harm the public interest. Therefore, the NAC has drawn the attention of the lawmaker to defective ways of payments in cash, risk to determine the appearance of corruption in the process of controls made by fiscal agents of the activity of licensed economic agents in trading ferrous and non-ferrous metal wastes.

Less objections were formulated on the draft government decision on the organization and functioning of the Ministry of Culture. The NAC experts did not identify contradictory norms in the project, however, they also found that the process of judicial norms development, the provisions on the transparency in the decision-making process were not observed. Anyway, the project corresponds to the technical legislative norms, the report says.

The NAC also identified the absence of corruption threats in the project of two government decisions, through which the National Agency of Auto Transport (NAAT) is excluded from the list of public entities with financial autonomy, and the NAAT inspectors with control function are assigned the status of the traffic agent with the right to stop vehicles in road traffic. These projects received the positive approval from the NAC.

We remind, the anti-corruption expertise is a mechanism through which the corruption risks are identified, that can appear when promoting draft legislative and normative acts by public entities. The NAC has been making anti-corruption expertise since 2006.

The full reports can be found on the official web-site www.cna.md , in the anti-corruption expertise section or by accessing the link https://cna.md/reports.php?l=ro