During his Facebook press conference on February 25, Head of SRC Davit Ananyan answered the questions of Facebook users, most of them referring to SRC end-of-year rewards. During the press conference, Mr. Ananyan made some weird statements.
Rewards and bonuses
Let us see what the difference is between the terms “reward” and “bonus”, and what regulations the law contains.
According to the RA Law on the Remuneration of State Officials, the award is a lump-sum payment that is paid to a public official in appreciation of his/her work and/or performance of specific tasks and/or quality works.
Referring to this question, Davit Ananyan stated that the SRC employees received monthly rewards of 80% of their wages, apart from their salaries.
Ananyan’s action is a brutal violation of law, and it is strange that Head of the State Revenue Committee does not know that the rewards were granted with numerous violations of the law.
Or maybe the Head of SRC meant bonuses rather than rewards?
Article 3 of the same law defines what a bonus is and who can receive it, while Article 7, Clause 6 defines the maximum amount of a bonus, which is 30%. Hence, neither can the “80 percent rewards” fit into the logic of bonuses.
The tax secret
Referring to the publications in the press regarding the SRC inspections and recorded violations at the Zangezur Copper and Molybdenum Combine, one of the users asked whether there was an act about violations prepared and annulled in one day.
Mr. Ananyan responded that the answer to that question might contain a tax secret.
According to Clause 63 of Article 4 of the RA Tax Code, information on violation of legal acts regulating tax relations and sanctions applied cannot be considered tax secret.
In this case, as we can see, the question of the user concerned only the detected violation and the applied sanctions, which cannot be considered a tax secret.
To sum up, it turns out that the employees of the RA State Revenue Committee were rewarded with violations of the law, and SRC Chairman Davit Ananyan cites the tax secret as a way of avoiding an undesirable question.