Soup kitchens in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) feed 17 thousand hungry and needy people. VAT is paid on donations for those same public kitchens. The initiative to abolish this tax on products with an expiration date could see the light of day only after the elections. Until then, the information is that it is possible to prepare 280 million meals from the food that is destroyed, because it is cheaper that way. To recall, BiH is the second poorest country in Europe after Albania. Officials are on collective annual leave, inflation is rising, and consequently prices.
Every fifth citizen is in a state of social need, and due to inflation, which is breaking infamous records in the region, that number is increasing day by day. This is evidenced by the employees of humanitarian associations and public kitchens, who have had more and more users on their list of needs over the years.
“In BiH, there are about 60 public kitchens, that is, restaurants that offer this type of assistance. About 17,000 people are fed in them,” told Maja Arslanagic-Hrbat, spokeswoman for the Pomozi.ba Association.
It is a long way, they say, to reduce the poverty rate, but one can start from those simple steps. One of them is the abolition of VAT on donated food. Because, according to the current law, it is more profitable for BiH companies to destroy food before the expiration date than to donate it. In order to prevent this, the leaders of the Mozaik Foundation sent an initiative to cancel this obligation to the Directorate for Indirect Taxation of BiH and letters to the parliamentarians.
“We have already received several positive responses from the BiH parliamentary commission, which gave a unanimous opinion – and we thank them for that. An initiative has been sent, so now we expect to check together with the BiH Indirect Taxation Authority when we can amend that part of the VAT Law as soon as possible,“ says Zoran Puljic, director of the Mozaik Foundation.
However, the Administration for Indirect Taxation of BiH says that the initiative is included in the new Draft Law on VAT, but it can only be approved after the law is adopted. The Council of Ministers of BiH is on the move, which could have solved the problem a long time ago – if they were more efficient in their work, Federalna writes.
E.Dz.
