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Excise for cars. Changes are coming!
The Sejm works on the project amending current Excise Act. This is somehow important case, because the Senate’s draft project assumes significant changes in the appraising method for such tax. According to the project, it will be probably assessed on the general basis of vehicle value. In spite of this, the following factors will be taken into account: engine capacity and European norms on emissions. In practice, people who are decided for vehicles with lesser impact on the environment will pay smaller excise. In spite of this, the vehicle’s depreciation index will be also influential on the amount of excise, this is de facto vehicle’s age. Newer cars will be favoured.
Why such regulations are planned? Currently, diversification in excise rates is a kind of problem. Binding regulations provide the excise for passenger cars that amounts to 3.1% of tax base in case of vehicles with engine up to 2000 cm³ and even 18.6 % of tax base in case of engines exceeding 2000 cm³. According to binding regulations, the value of particular vehicle is a basis in taxation.
Planners assume that current state of affairs leads to many irregularities. It all comes to i.e. decreasing the vehicle value and registering passenger cars as trucks in order to escape from taxation. Planners put emphasis on the fact, that now the majority of passenger cars on Polish roads are cars exceeding 10 years in age, that have simultaneous negative impact on natural environment. Thus, new Act should encourage the citizens for purchasing newer, more environmental friendly, and simply more safe cars. Moreover, another aspect is elimination of quite common procedure of registering very expansive cars outside the boarders of our country.
The Senate’s draft project assumes:
- taxing every vehicle up to 3.5 tonne with excise;
- removing ambiguous terms from vehicle definitions;
- exclusion of electric cars;
- exempting busses, antique vehicles and motorcycles from excise duty;
- withdrawal from step increase in taxation.
We mentioned that the vehicle depreciation index will influence on the final amount of excise. Lets have a closer look. This index is recounted on the basis of time, in which particular car will be used. The period of depreciation starts from the first vehicle registration and is recounted in months. There are obviously cars with significantly higher degree of impairment, against the results coming from theirs age. Also in such case, the excise will be settled according to additional depreciation index that will be dependant from the expert’s opinion. Such opinion will depend on the mileage of particular car, production year, equipment and technical state, in general.
There is one important change, namely according to new excise regulations, all vehicles with permissible weight not exceeding 3.5 t will be subjected to new Excise Act. Current cars, even when not exceeding 3.5 t and regarded as trucks, were not the object for excise duty until now.
