ATK urges singers to pay taxes

However, the challenge for this tax institution remains tax evasion.

ATK Director Ilir Murtezaj has talked about ATK's activities in combating informality, tax revenues and handling the estrada sector in the tax.

Murtezaj has stressed that they are working on identifying and creating data for individuals or businesses, such as hotels and restaurants, which have created capital gains but have not paid taxes.

He also called on singers and musical groups who have not reported their taxes to pay their incomes.

I want to call on everyone who hasn't started the process of controlling the singer, band or any other activity to declare real revenues. At the same time we're working on handling capital gains, this category of revenues that were reported in the past, but not in the size of real data. So, in this direction we're working on identifying and creating data for individvid individual or businesses that have generated capital gains and that haven't reported or paid taxes”, Murtesaj said.

The ATK director has admitted to having informality in Kosovo, but who, according to him, are trying to lower this phenomenon.

And we know that there's informality still to a considerable extent, but referring to the digitalisation of the work process in ATK from day to day, this information is shrinking, so it's downplaying or reducing the possibility of informality due to the digital advancements of ATK, so the creation of different software, which by combining different information from different sources to come, expose all the cases where we have information”.

“This also refers to the fact that the inspections we have had during the past year, an example in the gastronomy sector, in terms of hotels, restaurants, singers, musical groups and others, and we know that throughout the past year except for the ongoing inspections and communications that we have had through various meetings, we have continued to call on each of us to declare and pay each singer or music group that they actually accomplished and pay taxes. This has led to increased formalism, increased their inflows from about 10m euros in 2021 to over 21m euros in 2022, as well as an increase in tax payments from 800 thousand euros to about 2m euros”, Murtesaj said.

On the other hand, director Murtezaj has stressed thanks to the numerous reforms they have made, the ATK performance has increased.