On 29 November 2021, with the adoption of Federal Law No. 382-FZ, changes to the tax treatment of leasing transactions were introduced.

Changes affecting the calculation of property tax – clause 49 of Law 382-FZ makes amendments to Article 378 of Chapter 30 of the Tax Code, meaning that the tax for rented property, including finance lease (leasing) agreements, is payable by the lessor.

Changes affecting the calculation of profit tax:

• Law 382-FZ (clause 21) excludes clause 10 of Article 258 of the Tax Code, which allows the lessee or lessor to depreciate the leased property depending on who records the leased asset on their balance sheet under the terms of the agreement. In other words, the lessee will no longer be able to depreciate the leased asset in tax accounting starting from 2022, as was the case previously if the lessee accounted for the leased asset on their balance sheet – with the introduction of the changes, the leased asset will only be considered depreciable property by the lessor in tax accounting;
• clause 23 of the adopted law also changes the procedure for calculating profit tax in terms of how expenses under leasing agreements are recognised (sub-clause 10, clause 1 of Article 264 of the Tax Code) – if the payments under the agreement include the purchase price of the leased asset, which passes into the lessee’s ownership after the agreement ends under a sales agreement, the leasing payments are recognised as expenses less the purchase price;

Accounting for the purpose of paying transport tax does not change with the entry into force of Law 382-FZ.

The Federal Law comes into force on 1 January 2022.

In our message No. 6/2021 dated 06/11/2021, we informed about the planned changes in the workflow regulations, which could have a significant impact on the work of companies that use ERP systems hosted on servers located outside the territory of the Russian Federation.

On December, 24th 2021 the Ministry of Finance of Russia issued information message No. IS-Uchet-35 on the adoption of Order No. 224n dated 23.12.2021, according to which the due date for the requirement to store accounting documents on the territory of the Russian Federation, according to the Federal Accounting Standard FAS 27/2021, is postponed from January, 1st 2021 to January, 1st 2024.

The amendments were adopted in order to provide conditions for the organizations for proper preparation to store accounting documents in the Russian Federation, by postponing the due date of paragraph 25 of FAS 27/2021 from January 1st , 2022 to January 1st, 2024.

It is noted that the due date of the beginning of whole FAS 27/2021 standard remain in force, with the exception of paragraph 25 of FAS 27/2021 on the storage of accounting documents, data contained in such documents, and the placement of databases on the territory of the Russian Federation, which is subject to mandatory application from January 1st, 2024.

Information message No. 6/2021 with a detailed review of FAS 27/2021 can be found found at the following link.

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