The State Revenue Service Will Dig into Prisoners' Pockets

Today, the members of the Saeima adopted amendments to the Law on the Administration of Prisons in the third reading, which stipulate that the Prison Administration (PA) must provide the State Revenue Service (SRS) with information if the turnover in a prisoner's accounts exceeds 15,000 euros.

During the audit, the State Audit Office recommended that the Ministry of Justice and the Prison Administration, in cooperation with the Ministry of Finance and the State Revenue Service (SRS), take measures to facilitate the control over the financial transactions of prisoners to ensure tax payments and provide information to the SRS about transactions involving these funds.

According to the Latvian Penal Enforcement Code, convicted individuals have the right to receive money transfers without limit through the administration of the correctional institution and to send money transfers to relatives, and with the permission of the correctional institution's administration, also to other individuals.

The money received by the convict in a transfer is not issued to them but is credited to an account opened in the State Treasury for correctional institutions or to the cash register of the correctional institution. The convict's money is stored in the account or in the cash register of the correctional institution and is accounted for in the convict's personal cash card. The convict can only make money transfers with the permission of the person conducting the process.

Thus, a special procedure for handling the financial resources of prisoners has been established, and their circulation is permissible and actively carried out. Since the administration is neither a credit institution nor a payment service provider, the requirements for controlling financial resources do not apply directly to it. To facilitate voluntary tax payments by taxpayers, the amendments stipulate that the same requirements that apply to all citizens will also apply to prisoners and former prisoners.

The specified information will be presented to the SRS in an "Excel" format. This is explained by the fact that the resource management system "Horizon," which stores information about the financial resources of prisoners, does not have reports that would provide data in the required volume that can be prepared in the structure of an "XML" scheme. Therefore, information from the "Horizon" resource management system will be processed manually in Excel format with data filtering.

The information will include the same details defined in Article 22.3, Part 1.2 of the Law on Taxes and Fees, which the credit organization and payment service provider provide to the SRS about clients, where the total amount of debit or credit turnover on deposit accounts and payment accounts for the previous year in one credit organization or with one payment service provider is 15,000 euros or more, or the total amount of cash credited to the payment account in the previous year is 7,000 euros or more.