OREANDA-NEWS. January 23, 2012. The growing fiscal burden creates unfavorable business environment, - chairman of the National Confederation of Patronages of Moldova Leonid Cerescu. As Leonid Cerescu chairman of NCPM has said during the press conference covering the crisis of the social dialogue and policies discriminating business, higher taxes create prerequisites for economic entities to withdraw into shadow, for reduction of jobs, suspension of companies’ activities.

According to him, higher taxes will contribute few into the budget, contrary to expectations of the governing Alliance. The portion of shadow economy grew by 4 p.p. in 2011 to 27%, and may exceed 30% in 2012, Evghenii Roscovan, chairman of the Association of Small business has noted. Small and medium–sized business are especially vulnerable: their share in the total number of companies reduced by 1 p.p. to 97,7% within few years.

There has been a constant decline in the entrepreneurial activity: in 2007 it was registered over10 thou. of enterprises and closed over 1 thou; in 2011 it was registered about 6 thousand of enterprises, with about 4 thousand being closed. According to Vladimir Florea, vice-chairman of NCPM, the problem of adopting non-friendly business policies is that nobody is responsible for decision making and nobody takes into account proposals and recommendations of NCPM.

For example, economic entities have not been consulted on consequences of introduction of different taxe rate for different groups: the flat rate of the income tax at 12% for legal entities, 7% to 8% for sole proprietors and 7% for farms.

As InfoMarket has already reported, the fiscal policy for 2012 and the amendments to the Law about allowances for temporary incapacity for work and other benefits of social insurance also stipulate introduction of the flat simplified tax rate for small business at the amount of 3% from incomes received from operating activity and employers’ obligation to pay for three days of a sick leave of an employee instead of one.