The Ministry of Economic Development has made structural changes to the national project “Small and Medium Enterprises”, which were already approved by the project committee last week. Now the project is focused on creating infrastructure that accompanies the growth of SMEs at all stages and consists of four federal projects. The projects are as follows:

• unified digital platform. The  number of the platform users is expected to increase from 200 thousand people in 2021 to 500 thousand in 2024.

• involving potential entrepreneurs in small business in the pre-acceleration mechanism. The number of newly created SMEs is expected to increase from the current 760 thousand to 1.067 million in 2024.

• central federal project for the acceleration of SMEs. The project comprises complex financial loans, including concessional loans to SMEs, factoring and investment platforms, and tax instruments that work conjointly.

• a separate federal project intended for the self-employed persons.

According to the passport of the national project, 21.16 million people are working in the SME sector, including 1.2 million self-employed persons who have registered their status with the Federal Tax Service. Now the goal of the national project is to increase the number of people employed in the sector to 23 million people by 2024 (the goal of 25 million was postponed to 2030), the number of self-employed persons is expected to reach 2.1 million by that time.

Moreover, it is proposed to create “transitional tax regimes” to help the growing small companies adapt to standard tax regimes.

Original (in Russian)