Azerbaijan, November 16 / Trend, A. Akhundov /
One of the key tasks of the Government of Azerbaijan is to make regions fully self-sustainable, Finance Minister of Azerbaijan Samir Sharifov reported. He was speaking at a discussion of the draft of state budget and consolidated budget-2012 and of state budgets for three later years at a joint meeting of the Parliament's Committees on economic policy, social policy, defense and security, natural resources, energy and ecology, and agrarian policy on Wednesday.
"Naturally, this is no possible in some regions; however, we try to achieve this in regions with adequate potentials and capabilities," Sharifov noted.
He said the issue of regions' local incomes flowing to the state budget is important.
"We repeatedly examined the reason of decrease, as the tax statistics reported, of local incomes at a time when the state pays particular attention to socioeconomic development of regions and assigns a lot of funds for these purposes. We studied this problem jointly with the Tax Ministry and found out this is just a matter of methodological approach," Sharifov said.
Regional large taxpayers earlier passed registration at the Tax Ministry's Large Taxpayers Division based in Baku, as a result of which local incomes decreased while centralized incomes increased, he noted. "This matter has already been settled so we observe a positive change in local incomes now," Sharifov said.