
The government will undertake another reform aimed at the real declaration of salaries of employees from businesses in the country, but also intervention in informal employment. Referring to the medium income strategy 2024-2027, informal employment of employees includes 4 components: non-registration of employees, non-declaration of salary, non-declaration of working time and non-declaration of employment category or occupation.
According to the document, during the period 2019-2023, the number of job positions increased by 33,343 or 5%, while income from contributions increased by 45 billion lek or 47%. Salary reforms in the public administration have had an impact on the high rate of increase in contributions, i.e. the increase in salaries followed by the private sector as well. The data so far show a significant increase over the years in the number of job positions from 699,801 in 2019 to over 733 thousand in 2023.
But increasing the declaration of the real salary is a priority of the tax administration, which during the past year has had an increased focus on the elements of the salary, evidencing any obligation in social and health contributions and tracking and investigating possible schemes set up by these subjects for non-payment of social and health insurance contributions. Periodically, on a monthly basis, taxpayers who do not declare, declare with zero or change previous declarations with a reduction are identified.
Within this strategy, under this component, 7 measures are foreseen that will be taken to address the phenomenon. Such are: Designing an integrated plan in terms of non-declaration of employees; Improving inter-institutional cooperation for the coordination of actions in the framework of identifying undeclared or under-declared work; Analysis of the categories of persons who have the obligation to complete the individual annual income statement; Improving analysis and data exchange with third parties for undeclared or underdeclared work; Public awareness campaigns regarding the benefits of paying contributions; as well as: Developing partnerships with business and community representatives to identify informality in employment.
This reform aims to increase the declaration of the real salary of 16% of employees at the end of 2027 and increase the number of contributors in the scheme by 5.5%.