Proposition 53K1379

Projet de loi modifiant le Code des impôts sur les revenus 1992 en ce qui concerne le bonus à l'emploi et l'indemnité de dédit.

General information ¶

Submitted by

CD&V Leterme Ⅱ

Submission date

April 7, 2011

Official page

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Status

Adopted

Requirement

Simple

Subjects

direct tax tax incentive tax on income pay bonus payment minimum pay severance pay tax-free allowance

Voting ¶

Voted to adopt

Groen CD&V Ecolo LE PS | SP Open Vld MR

Voted to reject

∉ N-VA LDD VB

Abstained from voting

Vooruit

Party dissidents ¶

• Peter Luykx (CD&V) voted to reject.

Contact form ¶

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Discussion ¶

May 26, 2011 | Plenary session (Chamber of representatives)

Full source

Due to the delayed time and the vote that will take place very soon, I will refer to my written report.

I thank you.

Mr. Speaker, dear colleagues, I will keep my speech as short as possible given the late hour. We want to explain why we are against this bill.

This bill consists of two loops.

On the one hand, there is the tax treatment of cancellation fees. In current legislation, termination fees are either taxed at a progressive rate if they reach a period in which the employee still has to work, or at an average rate if they are awarded upon termination of a employment contract. With this bill, the government wants to change this regulation.

On the other hand, it is decided to divide the termination compensation on the social level into three parts.

In order to reach a compromise, the Government decided to exempt the dismissal benefit by taxing RVA for salaries obtained during the notice period or for the dismissal benefits obtained at the termination of an employment contract. A limited indexed amount of 600 euros for the year 2012 is exempted.

We cannot avoid it, the government wants to reduce the cost of dismissal for employers as much as possible. In order to benefit from the exemption, Article 38 § 5 of the draft draft creates a set of very complex conditions for the application of that exemption. The government itself acknowledges that these conditions are necessary in order to prevent abuses.

All this results in employers being loaded with even more administrative burdens. When retaining the corporate advance fee, additional payrolls should be drawn up, and so on. Even worse is that in our tax return for 2012 there must also be at least ten new codes to get this all arranged.

We don’t have enough, so let’s add a few more! The taxpayers themselves do not understand this. Even tax consultants do not understand this. Our tax officials need to invest even more time to check all those details, so they obviously have no more time to fight the real tax fraud.

A second loop is a tax credit of 85 euros not indexed, for low wages. This tax credit will be calculated on the basis of the work bonus. According to the government, this is a step forward in the fight against the unemployment decline and in the evolution of the purchasing power of persons with a minimum wage. It should be my heart that this tax credit makes me think hard about a tax credit that was introduced in 2002 for low activity income and still exists for self-employed. In itself, it is a noble goal, but the National Bank has calculated that the impact of such a tax credit on the net income for wage-takers remains unnoticed. Between the time when a person begins to work and the receipt of the tax credit at the time of the tax billing, one or two years pass.

Therefore, a tax credit is not effective in combating this unemployment drop. Therefore, in early 2005 that old tax credit for low wages was replaced by the current work bonus. Now they want to reintroduce a tax credit with a maximum of 120 euros. With this reintroduction of that tax credit, the government falls into the mistakes of the past.

If the government really wants to fight this fall in unemployment for low wages, it will rather have to do something about the different tax treatment of wages and replacement income. Since the tax credit is ineffective and we believe that self-employed workers should receive an equal benefit, we in the committee proposed that a tax benefit of 120 euros be granted not through a tax credit but through an increase in the tax-free amount from 6 830 euros to 7 280 euros.

We put this into an amendment that we submitted at this plenary session.

If all government parties look back on their 2010 election program, then almost all of them came up with the proposal to raise the tax-free minimum. This was the easiest way, according to many, to reduce the tax unemployment drop, as low wages are only exempt up to the taxable minimum of 6 830 euros. On the other hand, if there are no other incomes, unemployment benefits are exempted up to 16 071 euros. If we compare this with the current proposal, only through the welfare adjustment of the unemployment benefits, which was carried out in March, all workers should already receive a minimum tax advantage of 85 euros. Taking into account the proposal to grant a maximum of €120 in tax credits, the measure now proposed will yield a maximum of €35 which will be paid out within two years. If we take into account the inflation rate, then we get at 1 euro per month. With 1 euro difference, we will absolutely not solve the unemployment drop!

Compared to the taxation of the work bonus through a tax credit, as the government proposes, an increase in the tax-free amount provides a number of benefits. In fact, no data on the reduction of personal security contributions should be communicated to the tax authority. No additional codes should be created in the declarations; that would already be a very nice solution, because those ten new codes we see not at all. Furthermore, the increase in the tax-free amount can be immediately transferred to the scales of the corporate advance tax without much trouble. In this way, low-income employees can immediately enjoy the bonus of 100 or up to 120 euros.

My conclusion is that things are only made more complicated. In this way, the government is doing exactly the opposite of what the Investigative Committee on Tax Fraud recommends, namely simplifying our taxes. The result is therefore the tone of a compromise, i.e. super-wrapped and bureaucratic.

The next speakers are mr. Bacquelaine, Bonte and Gilkinet.

Mr. Speaker, since I do not fully agree with the previous intervention, I would like to emphasize some points that this fiscal component includes, namely the transposition of the Interprofessional Agreement.

As you know, we don’t have the ability to decide everything. There is, of course, the need to take into account the opinion of the social partners. This is the interprofessional agreement. The measures taken in this bill do not fully correspond to what we would have desired. That said, it goes in the right direction and I thought it was useful to re-accentuate it.

A mediation procedure was carried out in order to find a compromise and implement a balanced agreement to restore social peace and give a positive signal to both investors and citizens. This was done by the government to overcome the blockage that we must have seen.

This bill, which was voted today, must be examined in its entirety, which includes the salary standard set by royal decree and employment measures, including the extension of crisis measures and the gradual approximation of the worker-employee status. This was, as you know, the main measures of this AIP.

For our part, we consider that the priority should be placed on low wages. We have repeatedly said this: if we want to combat employment traps, we must necessarily ensure that low wages are favored, in particular through fiscal measures. This is the case for the tax credit of 120 euros. It can be considered to be too little. It is obvious! It will always be too little. However, this is a step that goes in the right direction and that allows not only to increase slightly, of course, the purchasing power of workers but also to fight against employment traps.

I wish we could take note of this significant progress. It is for us only the beginning of a much more ambitious program in this matter: to ensure that the burden of low wages decreases both socially for the worker himself and for the company as well as fiscally, so that too many taxes are not paid too quickly, as is currently the case in our country.

This measure is oriented precisely in the direction we want. We invite you, all confused groups, to take together other measures to increase the purchasing power of workers who still receive insufficient wages, so that this increased purchasing power favors the whole of our social preservation system in particular and that our society presents an insignificant unemployment rate. If one wants to avoid the employment trap, one must ensure that the gap between benefits and wage received increases further. This proposal goes in that direction. I wanted to emphasize that the government, in this difficult time, was able and had the courage to take responsibility in this matter.

Mr. Speaker, colleagues, I would like to speak for a moment about this important draft, even if it was only to explain why our group will abstain. You can also consider it as a vote statement.

Per ⁇ , however, it is even more an explanation to an amendment that we wish to continue. Also in the committee, I, together with colleague Van der Maelen, submitted an amendment to try to adjust something.

I give three reasons why we do this. But first, I would like to express my astonishment over the fact that an interprofessional agreement has already been referred twice, while I have not seen an interprofessional agreement in the last months and even in the last years. I have seen a compromise, which was the result of consultation within the government after the failure of the negotiations with a view to an interprofessional agreement. We have discussed this issue several times. In any case, a number of persons still consider the present text as the implementation of an interprofessional agreement.

That being said, I agree that this is a ⁇ complex arrangement. The minister, who is occasionally engaged in administrative simplification, was far away when the text was written. Those who will sweat it out will be the social secretaries, the citizens and the employers.

By the way, should the scarce resources at the disposal of the federal government – I believe to know that there are proposals for austerity requested by the negotiator – be spent on this? This afternoon, for example, following another discussion about the rising child poverty rates, we had to conclude that nothing is possible given the limited budget. However, there is a budget for this. We take note of this.

I am coming to the core of our amendment. It is incomprehensible that the new system introduces a discrimination between workers who work during their resignation period and workers who no longer have to work during their resignation period.

Thus, employees who do not perform during their notice period, which means they can stay at home from the first day, are taxally supported more than employees who perform during their notice period. There has been talk here about a fall in unemployment, but in fact it is a reward not to work. We do not understand that at all and therefore our group will refrain from the global vote on the design.

Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Minister, I thought it was important to intervene on behalf of all the workers and workers who get up every morning to earn the minimum wage, and to comment on this little piece of law that will be voted in a few minutes. It is therefore an appendix to the Interprofessional Agreement for which we regretted the lack of ambition and re-balancing in favor of workers. At that time, we had also submitted a series of amendments, including one that aimed to increase the minimum wage by twice ten euros per month (ten euros in the first year, ten more euros in the second year), this at the expense of the workers.

From the moment when the share of wages in relation to GDP is only decreasing, while the minimum wage is ⁇ low in our country, from the time when the previous increase of which it was the subject dates back to the Interprofessional Agreement 2006-2007 and that before that, the previous increase had occurred in 1993, or almost 20 years ago, that the workers concerned are increasingly in a situation of poverty or precariousness despite having an employment but which generates costs, in view of the profits of many employers and the aid granted by the State through sometimes generous tax deductions, this request did not seem unreasonable to us. Unfortunately, it did not obtain the consent of this assembly, which I regret.

The text we are going to vote today responds to the concern of increasing the ability of the poorest workers to meet their basic needs (feeding, accommodation, care if necessary). In this sense, we can only support it.

However, this answer is not perfect when it chooses the tax path. An increase in wages assumed by employers has the advantage of generating income for social security through contributions that are paid, which fuel our solidarity system and which generate deferred rights for workers, especially in terms of pensions. An increase in wages through taxation does not have this double advantage and is borne by the social security budget whose balance is more than fragile. The balance is achieved only through compensation from the general budget of the State and not from the contributions of the workers.

You forget the effort we have made, especially in health care, to help reduce the social security hole!

The debate can be resumed, but it may take time.

There is therefore an imbalance in the social security budget, which is compensated by a contribution from the healthcare budget and a contribution from the general budget.

This tax pathway is problematic since it is not offset by alternative structural financing, by savings achieved elsewhere, for example, by challenging the notional interest system or better taxation on capital. These trails must be activated quickly to raise the lowest wages and to fight poverty.

Similarly, in the absence of alternative structural financing, the taxation of part of the notice allowance and of the dismissal allowance is problematic. On the one hand, I told you that with regard to the increase by tax, these are less revenues for social security; on the other hand, while it is important to preserve the purchasing power of dismissed workers, the protective dimension of the notice compensation is altered by this lower cost of dismissal for employers.

In short, we will vote on this bill because it is better than nothing and it will help the poorest workers to improve their daily lives, in very modest proportions (10 euros per month). But this is only an additional spark, an absolutely insufficient craftsmanship in relation to the challenges of creating jobs, creating quality jobs, fighting poverty, solidarity and long-term financing of social security.

We discussed for a few hours a very important bill and legislation on family reunification; I will not deny it at the risk of reviving a long-term debate. I thought it was important, Mr. Frédéric and dear colleagues, to highlight that the socio-economic realities must, very quickly, be taken concrete by this Parliament: in this matter, the needs are important for job creation and the fight against poverty.

I hope that the vote on this bill augures the fact that this parliament will recover from these important issues because our fellow citizens expect a lot from us.