Tax on Professional Income: Preconditions for Introduction and Constitutional Fundamentals

The aim of this study is to identify the general and specific features of the theoretical and constitutional legal bases of the essence, content and preconditions for the transformation of the socioeconomic sphere in the Russian Federation. The constitutional establishment of market economy has predetermined the necessity of an actual transition from the command and administrative system to the market management. One of the crucial components of the given transition is the transformation of the socioeconomic sphere. In spite of numerous initiatives providing for socioeconomic changes, most of them were not realized due to their contradictions with the RF Constitution and the essence of the market economy. This situation has created the need to find solutions to this problem. The analysis is based on the current legislation of the Russian Federation, bills, articles of official media, foreign regulatory legal acts. The main methods of the study were formal legal (used to study the texts of the basic laws) and comparative legal (used to identify the common and the specific). The article uses the dialectical method of scientific knowledge, as well as logical, historical and systemic methods. Of particular importance were the methods of analysis and synthesis. In the article, the author analyzed the initiatives to change the socioeconomic sphere in their historical development. The first similar discussions were the results of the adoption of Decree No. 3 "On the Prevention of Social Dependence" in the Republic of Belarus. Despite the wide discussions of the experience of Belarusian colleagues, the implementation of the mechanism given in Decree No. 3 on the territory of the Russian Federation is impossible. Some attempts to transform the given concept according to Russian realities produced the idea of involving the non-working population into the system of payments to the extra-budgetary funds of Russia, or, as media called it, the idea of a tax on parasitism. But the bill was never introduced in the RF State Duma. Another initiative on the introduction of the category "self-employed" was put into effect but demonstrated its ineffectiveness, which predetermined the necessity to work out new legislative changes in this sphere. Having generalized the previous experience, a new special experimental procedure - a tax on professional income - was elaborated. The analysis of the innovation shows that this tax is an example of the changes in the state's approach to solving the problem of the population's shadow employment. In this case, the state does not strive for eradicating unemployment but it applies legal regulation to people who are officially unemployed. At the same time, this special tax procedure is consistent with the constitutional provisions and the state policy of constructing market economy. Its main feature is that the state transfers its responsibility for social security to the citizens themselves and also supplies the budgets of the constituent entities and the Federal Compulsory Medical Insurance Fund. Depending on the results of the experiment on the introduction of the tax on professional income, the state will either continue to implement the policy or have to search for new ways to transform the socioeconomic sphere.

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