4 ms·

Title is completely wrong. It's actually: [sum of family's last 3 years income] + 10,000 rubles > [sum of family's account balances]. > the bank accounts of c

Title is completely wrong. It's actually: [sum of family's last 3 years income] + 10,000 rubles > [sum of family's account balances]. > the bank accounts of civil servants, as well as members of their families, including minor children, will be checked by the prosecutor’s office. If it turns out that the proceeds from them exceed the total income of the official and his relatives for three years by more than 10,000 rubles, a lawsuit will be filed with the court for the forced withdrawal of these funds to the budget.

bombcar 5y ago
Isn’t it more “sum of income” > “sum of inflows”? It seems something relatively easy to check and relatively easy to bypass for those intending to do so.
callmeal 5y ago
>[sum of family's last 3 years income] + 10,000 rubles > [sum of family's account balances]. Wowow that is crazy. Anyone who was disciplined about saving/investing and has been doing so for > 5 years will easily meet that criteria!
- Volundr 5y ago
  Assuming this is anything like the US, capital gains and interest both count as income. Your (probably) not in trouble here simply for being a savvy investor. Obviously, INAL and definitely not a Russian Lawyer.
  - derefr 5y ago
    You missed the key point: it’s lifetime-to-date net worth (heuristic: current bank account balances) vs. recent income. As in, if you make X per year; and you have >3X in savings from Y>3 years of spending (a lot) less than you make and stuffing the difference under a mattress, then all your savings in excess of 3X get confiscated. In other words, similar to people on welfare in America, public servants in Russia are now not allowed to retain assets in excess of a certain limit proportional to their income—even when that income all came directly from their (government) job. This is analogous to a progressive wealth tax, but not the same; as a wealth tax still allows disproportionate wealth growth for the highest-income earners; while the goal of this measure is to leave you with at most exactly three years of however-much you’re currently making, and nothing more, no matter what your assets looked like before that. The key “feature” to observe about this approach, IMHO, is that under this system people who are close to the savings cap already, are incentivized to spend every ruble they make, as any extra “left over” come audit time will be taken away. (It’s a bit like the game-theoretic consequences of yearly-limit insurance coverage, actually!)
    - cultofmetatron 5y ago
      my first thought was "maybe they'll buy into gold or bitcoin" but then who's going to be accepting rubles for gold or bitcoin at this point. The Ruble is essentially worthless now.
    - Volundr 5y ago
      > You missed the key point: it’s lifetime-to-date net worth (heuristic: current bank account balances) vs. recent income. I've now reread the original article several times, and I can't figure out where your getting that from. The phrasing used in the article is "If it turns out that the proceeds from them exceed the total income of the official and his relatives for three years by more than 10,000 rubles", which I can't parse into that and the source for the article appears to both be down and Russian, so I guess I'll take your word for it.
      - db48x 5y ago
        “proceeds from them” = the amount in all of your accounts and the accounts of your relatives (no definition given here but presumably they mean your dependents). “total income … for three years” = you and your relatives/dependents income for the last three years. “X exceeds Y by more than ₽10,000” = X > Y + ₽10,000. Let’s make up some numbers and see where they lead. Suppose that you are a middle–aged civil servant and your salary has been ₽100,000 for the last three years. Y = ₽300,000, obviously. You’ve been saving for your whole life, so the sum total of all of your accounts, X, is ₽500,000. Most of that is in whatever the Russian equivalent of pensions or 401ks are, so they have been earning money for you. Either collecting interest, or by gaining value on the stock market or whatever. Let’s say that your average growth over the last 3 years was 5%. That means you earned ₽68,000 in interest over those three years. Assuming that this adds into Y, your total income, then Y is ₽368,000. Well, ₽500,000 is certainly larger than ₽378,000, so your name comes to the attention of the prosecutor. However, I disagree that this means that you automatically lose anything. The article says: “In order not to lose money, the official will have to prove the legality of their appearance on the account.” Presumably then you won’t lose anything if your records show that you obtained it all legally. On the one hand, you do want to catch corrupt officials who have been taking bribes or kickbacks. On the other hand, choosing this means to do it seems counter–productive, since you have to expect that everyone who is saving up for retirement in some way will qualify for investigation. Since the criteria for investigation are not correlated with the crime that they are trying to detect, they are going to have all the false positives.
- __s 5y ago
  Try to evaluate the rule with some reasonableness. There's likely a mechanism to report interest as income, or the balance of investments would be based on deposits & not effective worth
  - Bootvis 5y ago
    Confiscating money if people have too much according to some weird heuristic is inherently unreasonable.
    - geysersam 5y ago
      It's a tool to investigate and deincentivize corruption. Not some state income tax.
      - grey-area 5y ago
        Putin is the most corrupt individual on earth who has stolen billions from his country and runs a mafia state. this law is not to ‘deincentivize corruption’, but I guess it might help stave off state bankruptcy for another week.
        throwaway89219 5y ago
    - 411111111111111 5y ago
      Not necessarily, it depends as always. Heavily penalizing accumulation of cash like that could be reasonable, but doing it without announcing it at least a year forward makes it hard to argue that it's anything but a cashgrap. But the idea issue is viable if the explicit goal is to make high cash reserves impossible. People would instead have to invest and various accounts (I.e. pension plans etc) have to be exempt. So it's theoretically reasonable if the economy is suffering because the wealth is never being spen, but that sounds like a very unlikely situation to occur in today's consumption society.
- pl0x 5y ago
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  Punishment for using a Russian bank and not offshoring your assets... What is next building a wall to keep people from "voting with their feet"?
ab35 5y ago
First of all, it is about deposits to accounts [sum of family's last 3 years income] + 10,000 rubles > [sum of family's deposits to all accounts for the year of control]. Then, the law states that prosecutor's office should requests the explanations about the source of deposits from an official. Only if the explanations are not provided, the funds could be seized. http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001202203060014?index=2&rangeSize=1 http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/00012022030600... Article 8.2.1
awb 5y ago
Sorry, I had to take some liberties given the title character restraints, but the details are in the article.

bombcar 5y ago

Isn’t it more “sum of income” > “sum of inflows”? It seems something relatively easy to check and relatively easy to bypass for those intending to do so.

callmeal 5y ago

>[sum of family's last 3 years income] + 10,000 rubles > [sum of family's account balances]. Wowow that is crazy. Anyone who was disciplined about saving/investing and has been doing so for > 5 years will easily meet that criteria!

Volundr 5y ago
Assuming this is anything like the US, capital gains and interest both count as income. Your (probably) not in trouble here simply for being a savvy investor. Obviously, INAL and definitely not a Russian Lawyer.
- derefr 5y ago
  You missed the key point: it’s lifetime-to-date net worth (heuristic: current bank account balances) vs. recent income. As in, if you make X per year; and you have >3X in savings from Y>3 years of spending (a lot) less than you make and stuffing the difference under a mattress, then all your savings in excess of 3X get confiscated. In other words, similar to people on welfare in America, public servants in Russia are now not allowed to retain assets in excess of a certain limit proportional to their income—even when that income all came directly from their (government) job. This is analogous to a progressive wealth tax, but not the same; as a wealth tax still allows disproportionate wealth growth for the highest-income earners; while the goal of this measure is to leave you with at most exactly three years of however-much you’re currently making, and nothing more, no matter what your assets looked like before that. The key “feature” to observe about this approach, IMHO, is that under this system people who are close to the savings cap already, are incentivized to spend every ruble they make, as any extra “left over” come audit time will be taken away. (It’s a bit like the game-theoretic consequences of yearly-limit insurance coverage, actually!)
  - cultofmetatron 5y ago
    my first thought was "maybe they'll buy into gold or bitcoin" but then who's going to be accepting rubles for gold or bitcoin at this point. The Ruble is essentially worthless now.
  - Volundr 5y ago
    > You missed the key point: it’s lifetime-to-date net worth (heuristic: current bank account balances) vs. recent income. I've now reread the original article several times, and I can't figure out where your getting that from. The phrasing used in the article is "If it turns out that the proceeds from them exceed the total income of the official and his relatives for three years by more than 10,000 rubles", which I can't parse into that and the source for the article appears to both be down and Russian, so I guess I'll take your word for it.
    - db48x 5y ago
      “proceeds from them” = the amount in all of your accounts and the accounts of your relatives (no definition given here but presumably they mean your dependents). “total income … for three years” = you and your relatives/dependents income for the last three years. “X exceeds Y by more than ₽10,000” = X > Y + ₽10,000. Let’s make up some numbers and see where they lead. Suppose that you are a middle–aged civil servant and your salary has been ₽100,000 for the last three years. Y = ₽300,000, obviously. You’ve been saving for your whole life, so the sum total of all of your accounts, X, is ₽500,000. Most of that is in whatever the Russian equivalent of pensions or 401ks are, so they have been earning money for you. Either collecting interest, or by gaining value on the stock market or whatever. Let’s say that your average growth over the last 3 years was 5%. That means you earned ₽68,000 in interest over those three years. Assuming that this adds into Y, your total income, then Y is ₽368,000. Well, ₽500,000 is certainly larger than ₽378,000, so your name comes to the attention of the prosecutor. However, I disagree that this means that you automatically lose anything. The article says: “In order not to lose money, the official will have to prove the legality of their appearance on the account.” Presumably then you won’t lose anything if your records show that you obtained it all legally. On the one hand, you do want to catch corrupt officials who have been taking bribes or kickbacks. On the other hand, choosing this means to do it seems counter–productive, since you have to expect that everyone who is saving up for retirement in some way will qualify for investigation. Since the criteria for investigation are not correlated with the crime that they are trying to detect, they are going to have all the false positives.
__s 5y ago
Try to evaluate the rule with some reasonableness. There's likely a mechanism to report interest as income, or the balance of investments would be based on deposits & not effective worth
- Bootvis 5y ago
  Confiscating money if people have too much according to some weird heuristic is inherently unreasonable.
  - geysersam 5y ago
    It's a tool to investigate and deincentivize corruption. Not some state income tax.
    - grey-area 5y ago
      Putin is the most corrupt individual on earth who has stolen billions from his country and runs a mafia state. this law is not to ‘deincentivize corruption’, but I guess it might help stave off state bankruptcy for another week.
      - throwaway89219 5y ago
  - 411111111111111 5y ago
    Not necessarily, it depends as always. Heavily penalizing accumulation of cash like that could be reasonable, but doing it without announcing it at least a year forward makes it hard to argue that it's anything but a cashgrap. But the idea issue is viable if the explicit goal is to make high cash reserves impossible. People would instead have to invest and various accounts (I.e. pension plans etc) have to be exempt. So it's theoretically reasonable if the economy is suffering because the wealth is never being spen, but that sounds like a very unlikely situation to occur in today's consumption society.
pl0x 5y ago
AniseAbyss 5y ago
Punishment for using a Russian bank and not offshoring your assets... What is next building a wall to keep people from "voting with their feet"?

ab35 5y ago

First of all, it is about deposits to accounts [sum of family's last 3 years income] + 10,000 rubles > [sum of family's deposits to all accounts for the year of control]. Then, the law states that prosecutor's office should requests the explanations about the source of deposits from an official. Only if the explanations are not provided, the funds could be seized. http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001202203060014?index=2&rangeSize=1 http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/00012022030600... Article 8.2.1

awb 5y ago

Sorry, I had to take some liberties given the title character restraints, but the details are in the article.