Institute for Tax Reform: Workshops on NGO financial management to start in late May

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Three projects are launched this year: for united territorial communities and small towns, for managers of public organizations, and to facilitate Ukraine’s transition to e-government. This was stated by representatives of the NGO “Institute for Tax Reform” at a press briefing held at Ukraine Crisis Media Center.

The first project – “Rating of Cities” – aims to show local communities the pros and cons of their region in terms of investment attractiveness. It is implemented by the ITR together with experts of “Creative Business”. “Our main task is to create conditions for local communities to gain necessary knowledge and tools to make informed decisions concerning the development of their areas, and, especially, to attract resources for the development of their areas. (…) This is the development of small areas, small towns which do not currently have such tools,” explained Ruslan Anfilov, outsource consultant of the NGO “Institute for Tax Reform”.

Based on the ratings, including indicators of openness and transparency, investors will be able to decide where to invest a capital and communities will see what they need to improve in order to attract investors, both foreign and domestic. “We hope that until the autumn we will prepare the ranking positions and invite all territorial communities to participate in the project,” added Mr. Anfilov. They promise that the ranking will be independent and unbiased, like the journalist competition Media.etc.

The second project is “Financial Management for NGOs: simple words about complex things”. It is the educational project in partnership with the German government’s program implemented by federal company GIZ. It will include educational workshops for NGOs starting with clarification of the features of taxation to NGOs. We will teach them to write projects and use their best endeavors for raising funds. We will clarify the features of taxation and tax reporting, explain how to put people on the job on a voluntary basis – all things that in our view are necessary for NGO to be the model of transparent business,” informed Olena Khotenko, chairman of the NGO “Institute for Tax Reform”.

The project will start May 30 and cover three regions – Zaporizhia, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk. These regions have been chosen by GIZ. “We have regions where associations of internally displaced persons are very active, but they, unfortunately, are not covered by this project. So, we hope we will manage at least to send them to study in the above regions,” added Milana Onys’ko, senior specialist on preparation, selection and implementation of projects and programs of the Department for International Cooperation Projects and Programs of the Ministry of Temporarily Occupied Territories and IDP of Ukraine.

The third project is “E-tax service”. “We cannot neglect the information technology opportunities in tax regulation and revenue and expenditure management. The state is just a tool of redistribution of money accumulated by society. That is why society should have the simplest possible mechanisms to control their expenditures and redistribute the funds available in the system,” noted Andrii Zablotskii, expert of the NGO “Institute for Tax Reform”.
Experts will develop recommendations on how to simplify and automate the process of permitting, tax and financial reporting as well as transactions between economic entities, how to introduce verification and automation of social benefits. “Many services remain complicated and incomprehensible. We will work hard to make them more comprehensible to an ordinary citizen so that he could use them in 2-3 clicks,” he added.