The State Duma has proposed to control the quality of online courses and seminars of influential people. Many of them are not related to education, but enjoy tax benefits established for this field.
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Bloggers will be required to obtain a license to provide educational services.
The deputies have prepared a package of bills on this topic with amendments to the law “On Education” to improve legislation in the blogosphere. The documents will be presented at the meeting of the group, writes Izvestia.
In 2022, the total revenue of online schools reached 95 billion rubles. In the first quarter of 2023, the segment’s revenue amounted to 46.7 billion rubles; by the end of the year, turnover increased by 30% and reached 123 billion rubles.
The most popular niches are new professions, health courses, entrepreneurship, psychology, esotericism, financial education, fitness and relationships.
The document points out that the problem with these services is that they are located in a single legal and commercial area. This negatively affects the quality of these courses and can be detrimental to consumers.
“Legal entities providing educational services today are required by law to have a license for this activity. However, it is not a requirement for individual entrepreneurs. This order is the Achilles heel of the law. Firstly, it is an uneven playing field, as it is easier for individual entrepreneurs to engage in this type of business. Secondly, it artificially encourages bloggers and teachers to evade taxes and licenses through a system of business fragmentation. When in reality there is an online school, where many teachers teach thousands of people and, according to the documents, they are all registered as independent individual entrepreneurs,” said Yana Lantratova, co-chair of the working group.
He noted that this issue is especially relevant due to the popularity of blogger courses and various online schools to prepare students for the Unified State Exam and the Unified State Exam.
Experts believe the initiative will be supported if it helps clean up the market.
Following the withdrawal of foreign advertisers and platforms in 2022, the income of some influencers fell by up to 80%. In 2023, several bloggers were “dispossessed”: the Investigative Committee accused the author of the “marathon of desires” Elena Blinovskaya, millionaires Alexandra Mitroshina, Valeria Chekalina and Anastasia Ivleeva of non-payment of taxes on an especially large scale. Kommersant reported on the “black list” of influencers, which was taken over by the Federal Tax Service (FTS).
Dmitry Shumeiko, founder of the consulting company Shumeiko and Partners, told RB.RU how bloggers can manage financial and accounting issues so that tax authorities have no questions.
Author:
Karina Pardaeva
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
