Crimea Claims Right To Special 2003 Budget

Crimean authorities will once again press for the peninsular excise, income, and land tax receipts to be committed to the budget of the autonomous republic as well as for increased subsidies and funding from the state coffers when the 2003 state budget is drafted, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Crimean Autonomous Republic Serhiy Kunitsyn told a government meeting. According to him, at a recent Cabinet meeting Ukrainian Premier Anatoly Kinakh quite favorably received the Crimeans’ requests and instructed a government task force headed by Finance Minister Ihor Yushko to “revise provisions on the 2003 budget.” Serhiy Kunitsyn has dispatched his deputies and government ministers to Kyiv “to make a case for our stand on the budget.” Representatives of the republic’s Finance Ministry are currently visiting Kyiv. In this connection, Crimean Supreme Council Speaker Borys Deich and Premier Serhiy Kunitsyn have addressed a letter to President Leonid Kuchma in which the Crimean authorities remind that ever since 1997 VAT, income tax receipts, administrative fines, and proceeds from the privatization of state property and foreign trade have been channeled from the consolidated Crimean budget into the state coffers of Ukraine. With the squeeze on the peninsular budget to be applied by the government in 2003, it will part with excise tax receipts to be thus earmarked for the state budget and, the Crimean administration fears, the fraction of budget revenues set apart for the autonomous republic will shrink threefold to a mere 36%, while subsidies and funding from the state budget of Ukraine will account for the main share of receipts of the consolidated budget, with reciprocal budgetary transfers to exceed two-thirds of the whole consolidated budget. Incidentally, the Crimean constitution ratified by Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada provides for the autonomy’s right to a special budget. In practice, the Crimea has been applying this pattern since mid-nineties when an experimental single-channel budget was first put to use. Ever since then, budget formation practices of the republic have varied from year to year. The 2002 peninsular budget was formed taking into account the excise, income, and land tax receipts in the Crimea. This year’s planned excise tax receipts have been set at UAH 323.6 million, with income and land tax receipts planned at UAH 125 million and UAH 16.5 million respectively. In 2001, a total of UAH 1.397 billion in taxes has been collected on the peninsula. Of this, UAH 1.159 billion or 83% was earmarked for the Crimean consolidated budget, reports Mykyta KASIANENKO.