7 min
While quarantine measures are being tightened in Moscow, many companies are desperate to return to the office in the near future. And some people appreciated the remote working advantages during the first wave of the pandemic: online meetings could be a good alternative, employees successfully cope with their tasks without close supervision of their chiefs and do not have to spend time on travel to office anymore which contributes to increased loyalty to their employer. However there’s more to this than meets the eye. We would like to tell what pitfalls switching to remote work can be fraught with for the companies.
A FAREWELL TO OFFICE!
When switching to remote working regime, the first thing the companies want to give up is rented areas. However one should be alert to certain nuances. A lease agreement has its own terms and penalties. The tenant usually shall notify about its intention to terminate the agreement at least two months before the actual vacating of the premises. Accordingly, all this time you will have to pay for the unnecessary area.
Another problem that tenants might face is permanent improvements. These include doors, windows, new electrical wiring – that is, any transformations that cannot be used separately from the premises. The landlord is unlikely to let you move out, leaving holes in the walls, but if you leave these improvements as a gift, you will have to pay an additional tax.
An what should be done in order not to lose your money? According to an ideal scenario the landlord agrees to permanent improvements, such as the construction of partitions, and then reimburses the cost of such repair. Such an agreement is recorded in the acceptance certificate, including the cost of the said improvements. In this case, the tenant recognises the amount of depreciation over the period of use of such improvements in expenses, and the compensation received from the landlord in taxable income. If the landlord refuses to compensate you for the costs of such improvements, you will have to transfer the permanent improvements free of charge and pay VAT on the cost of the improvements being transferred. The amount of tax directly depends on the market value of the permanent improvements, which can be determined by a professional appraiser. And this is another additional item of expenditures for you.
After you give up the office work, you will also have to find a place for your hardware. The cost of services provided by a transport company, renting data center facilities for the period of your moving (so as not to suspend business processes), and placing your server and network equipment in the data center depends on the size and specifics of the company, as well as the reliability and fault tolerance of the data center. For example, the average cost of equipment storage for a company with up to 500 employees starts from 400-500 thousand per month.
TO SELL, OR TO HAND OVER, THAT IS THE QUESTION
After moving, the company will have to get rid of unnecessary furniture and hardware. In such a situation the company has several options. The first option is to leave all this as a gift to the landlord or distribute it among the employees. However there arises another problem that we discussed earlier, i.e. payment of VAT on the market price of the property being transferred.
The second option is to sell unnecessary office furniture and hardware to its employees or other buyers, for example, by placing ads on such sites as Avito, Yula. But in this case you will need a cash register. According to Letter of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation No. 03-01-15/4355 dated 25 January 2019, the situation when an employer sells its own property to its employee is qualified by the regulatory authorities as a cash sale.
The tax authorities might impose a fine on an entrepreneur for the absence of a cash register in the amount of up to 50 % of the sum actually received during the period of trading without an online cash register, but not less than RUB 10,000. Legal entities will be fined up to 100% of the product amount, but not less than RUB 30,000.
Installation of an online cash register will take some time. Registration of this device will involve registration of a fiscal memory device and a cash register on the website nalog.ru and obtaining of an electronic digital signature. In addition, you will need to sign a cooperation agreement with the fiscal data operator and the mobile operator or Internet service provider for the smooth transfer of checks to regulatory authorities.
According to Federal Law No. 54-FZ, the application for registration of cash registers (CCT) shall include:
-
the company’s full corporate name or an individual entrepreneur’s full name;
-
INN (Taxpayer Identification Number);
-
address and location of the cash register;
-
serial number and model of cash register equipment;
-
serial number and model of the fiscal memory device.
The cost of the device itself starts from RUB 2 ths.
If the cash register is no longer required, you shall de-register it from the tax authorities in order not to spend money on its maintenance. You can do this operation yourself or through a legal representative against a notarized power of attorney. This operation costs not less than RUB 1,300 and requires additional documents. You can also contact your provider for the relative service. This will take one business day and will cost RUB 2-3 ths, not to mention the cost of EDS.
Afterwards you can sell the used cash register. The period and cost of such operation depend on the market conditions and the seller’s promptitude.
HOW MUCH WILL THE NEW TERMS OF COOPERATION COST?
So, if you have already got rid of the office and unnecessary equipment, you will have to re-register employees. The official procedure for switching your employees to a new working regime involves termination of the current employment contract and conclusion of a new one or execution of a supplementary agreement to the existing document.
Note that the contract shall include the city the employee will be located in, as this fact might affect the employee’s salary. For example, previously, the employee rented an apartment near the office in Moscow, but now he decided to give it up and go to his native town Cherepovets. After specifying this fact in the contract, the company will have to pay him/her at a regional salary coefficient of 1.25 (Russian Government Regulation No. 494 dated 16 July 1992). Therefore, you should definitely check whether the employee plans to work from a region with special climatic conditions. Otherwise you will have to pay for his/her work in an increased amount. Moreover, you should specify in the contract the frequency of your personal meetings with your employee, the party to be charged with business trip expenses, if the employee has moved to another city or country. This will allow you to avoid additional compensations for visa processing and expensive air tickets.
Besides, you should also settle the issue relating to an electronic digital signature. Subject to the labour code of the Russian Federation, an employer and a remote employee are obliged to exchange electronic documents using enhanced qualified electronic signatures.
However, the law does not regulate at whose expense this signature should be issued. Therefore, the employer and the employee will have to agree separately on the responsibility for this item and specify it in the contract or a supplementary agreement. A basic certificate of a qualified electronic signature for legal entities costs RUB 1,900.
RELOCATION OF PERSONNEL
We all remember one of the most discussed presidential decrees during the pandemic about non-working days that the employer had to pay for. Some companies whose business processes allowed sent employees to work from home. However, not everyone had the opportunity to equip properly their workplaces, so these costs fell upon the companies.
Cost of a workplace estimator for the company will include such items as: purchase of furniture (an office desk and a computer desk) from RUB 10,000 + purchase of computer hardware from RUB 30,000 + payment for Internet connection from RUB 500 per month + payment for mobile communication from RUB 200 depending on the required size of the calling plan.
In addition, you should take into account the increased load on IT systems and the need to create remote connections, which is one of the most complex and resource-intensive projects. In this connection the company’s IT specialists will have to analyse the existing infrastructure, collect and analyse the information to achieve the set goals. After a project for upgrading the existing equipment is developed, you should start planning the purchase of the required equipment, hiring employees to install the new equipment and new services. Another essential point to remember is that IT specialists will have to support new equipment and services. Therefore, it is very difficult to predict the cost of such a project, as it depends on the size of the company, its computerization, and the number of specialists in the IT Department. The estimated cost of such a project starts from several million roubles.
So, before any abrupt switching to remote work, I recommend calculating the potential costs: the cost of abandoning the office and unnecessary equipment, switching to electronic document workflow, and business trips that can potentially fall on the employer. It may be more profitable for the company to keep the office, to agree on a discount or deferred payment of rent, than to spend a lot of money on switching to a new working regime.
Source:
