How much do the largest enterprises in Central and Eastern Europe pay in taxes? Who pays taxes in Hungary, Czechia, Poland, Latvia, Slovenia and Bulgaria? These were the questions that DemNet sought the answers to in a study compiled jointly with the investigative reporters of the London-based Finance Uncovered project and NGOs dealing with the issue of tax justice in the previously mentioned countries.
In the study’s chapter on Hungary it emerged that the country’s ten biggest corporations paid less than half a percent in taxes on their profits – regardless of the corporate tax rate that applied to each of them, which was either 10% or 19% depending on the taxable amount of their total revenues as defined in the relevant tax act of 2015 (the corporate tax has since been lowered to a flat rate of 9%).
The country analysis also shows that even as the aggregated turnover of the top 11 corporations in Hungary made up 25% of the Hungarian GDP in 2015, the corporate taxes they paid only amounted to 2% of the state’s revenue from this tax.
To read more about the report in Hungarian, click here.