H25 - Business Taxes and Subsidies including sales and value-added (VAT)Return

This paper discusses the current Czech and European legal framework applicable to the adjustment to the taxable amount with respect to claims partially cancelled due to the insolvency of the customer resolved by reorganisation. The partial cancellation, according to the authors, serves as grounds to adjust a taxable amount under the EU VAT Directive. The supplier is entitled to issue a corrective invoice and claim a refund of a proportion of the VAT paid with respect to the delivery of goods or services to an insolvent debtor. However, such practice is not yet followed by the Czech tax authorities who do not allow for a reduction of a taxable amount in reorganisation and only allow such reductions in the case of bankruptcy liquidation. The paper argues that this approach is not compatible with European law. Moreover, such a different treatment of VAT payers in bankruptcy liquidation (resulting in higher satisfaction of VAT taxpayers as creditors) puts reorganisation at a considerable disadvantage and is contrary to the basic principles of insolvency law. Finally, the paper argues that the corresponding claim of the tax authority resulting from the VAT base adjustment constitutes a standard pre-insolvency claim and should not be preferred in the insolvency proceedings under Czech law.

The goal of the paper is to asses differences between taxation of various tobacco products in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. When comparing the taxation of cigarette and fine cut tobacco, it is usually expected that one cigarette is equivalent to 1 gram of tobacco, while the European Commission uses a conversion rate of 0.75g. However, to accurately evaluate this disproportion, the real volume of tobacco contained in one cigarette was weighed using calibrated scales. Our experiment showed that the excise duties on tobacco are between 80-51% of the cigarette taxation in the Czech Republic; the range is between 78-47% in Slovakia and 67-37% in Poland, depending on the conversion rate. Even if it is highly unlikely that taxation of both products could be fully equal, we still believe that there is a potential for increasing taxation of fine cut tobacco, which could increase tax revenues by 0.7-2.7 billion CZK in the Czech Republic.

This article focuses mainly on the environmental costs connected with legislative compliance in the Czech Republic, possibilities of their identification and observation in corporations and suggestions for cutting them down. First, we present an overview of theoretical concepts regarding determination of costs connected with environmental protection in companies and possible difficulties with identification of this kind of costs; however, there are various methods depending both on the authors' opinions and purposes of environmental cost identification in companies. Then, the article discusses particular inputs and outputs of companies and tries to identify possible environmental costs on both sides. Generally, both the simplest and cheapest way for the companies is to concentrate on such environmental costs that are connected with legislation in force; therefore, the Czech Republic's current environmental protection law is analyzed for this purpose. After that, the article focuses briefly on suggestions for possible corporate savings and environmental cost reduction, based on the legislation in force in the Czech Republic. Finally, the key element of this article is a case study based on the information obtained from a real company. The case study presents results of both identification and quantification of particular environmental costs connected with legislation in force in a small business in the Czech Republic in 2010.