‘Regarding interaction between the state and business we plan to settle the issue of presenting invoices in e-for both legally and technologically by the end of the year’, - Dmitri Milovantsev, Deputy Minister of IT and Communications, reports at the ‘All-Russia meeting on information technology and communication on the results of 2007 and challenges for 2008’. He says the Ministry of IT and Communication has reached understanding with the Ministry of Finance. ‘In general, the challenge for the coming two-three years is to eliminate discrimination of e-documents’, - Mr Milovantsev says.
Currently there are many employees in any organization engaged in paper documents processing, large areas being used for storage of documents. Thus, according to one of IT integrators employing a total staff of 300 about 250 invoices are compiled a day, i.e. there are more than 50 thousand documents in the archives by the end of the year. Any person can understand that enormous effort and time is necessary to check the given invoices. It should be note, that when goods are transferred from seller to customer both delivery note and invoice should be signed in Russia, the latter necessary for VAT accounting.
Meanwhile, the technological basis for e-cooperation between the state and business has already been developed. ‘At present engineering and technical issues of legal interaction between the agencies, the state and citizens, the state and business when providing public services in e-form using the infrastructure of the All-Russian Public Information Centre, which allows processing personal data, have been solved, - Vladimir Matyukhin, Head of the Federal Agency on IT, said reporting at the meeting – The technological basis for e-government and quality public services provision in ‘one window’ mode has been formed’.
Thus, both technical opportunities of processing invoices in e-form and convenience when checked by supervisory authorities attest the necessity to eliminate storage of paper invoices. The only obstacle for transferring to e-invoices is absence of regulatory base, which vests e-documents with equal rights to paper documents.
‘If suppliers and sellers interact in e-form, then it is strange that the state fells out of the given format, - Dmitri Milovantsev believes. – Piles of paper invoices, which are rather complicated to check, are stored in companies, while tens of employees are engaged in processing documents, which are of no interest to tax authorities’.
It should be noted, that together with gradual elimination of paper documents in interactions between the state and business the RF Ministry of IT and communication is working at providing public services in e-form. ‘By 2015 the Russian citizens should be vested with the opportunity to receive 100% of public services in e-form, - Mikhail Luchinkin, Deputy Director of the Department of public programs, infrastructure development and utilization of scarce resources at the Ministry of IT and Communication, says. – A Unified state services portal is to be launched in test mode on April 1st 2008 to provide access to the mentioned above services’.
The portal is planned to be launched in full-fledge exploitation on January 1st 2009, while the list of services, which will be provided through ‘one window’, might consist of one hundred items, including registration of real estate, services for businessmen and all social services related to exercising constitutional rights of citizens.
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Quelle/Source: CNews, 15.02.2008
