The tax burden for the majority of citizens won’t be ‘intolerable’ in case of changes in the system of property taxation. This is what Head of the Department of Revenue Policies and Administration Methodology at the Ministry of Finance of Armenia Ori Alaverdyan told reporters today. According to him, the government hasn’t set a goal to create an extra tax burden for citizens. “We took into consideration the incomes of the population and tried to choose an amount of tax that citizens can pay,” Alaverdyan said.

Alaverdyan recalled that the new property tax will be introduced in the course of six years. He also assured that if the government hadn’t introduced the amendments to the Tax Code for the year 2021, the property tax would have been much higher than envisaged by this reform since the new system for calculation of the cadastral value would enter into force and the tax rates would stay the same.

When asked why the reform was presented to the parliament in June, Alaverdyan stated that the government had actively considered the changes in January-February, but due to the coronavirus, which became a reason for overload of work for the government, the process of forwarding the bill to the National Assembly was prolonged.

Alongside this, Alaverdyan stated that the property tax reforms were envisaged by the government program and the Tax Code of 2018.