WARSAW: A flat tax will be part of a “comprehensive” new tax system to be introduced in Poland in 2018, a senior government official has told the Gazeta Polska weekly. As well as the flat tax, the new system will raise the tax-free income threshold from PLN 3,000 (EUR 680) to PLN 8,000 annually, the Chairman of the Permanent Committee of the Council of Ministers, Henryk Kowalczyk, said. “The amount free [from tax] will be embedded in the new tax system,” Kowalczyk said in an interview with the paper.
A pledge to raise the tax-free threshold was among a swathe of promises made by the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party ahead of its victory in parliamentary elections in October 2015. “True to our declarations, we want to raise it to PLN 8,000. But this won’t happen until 2018,” Kowalczyk said, adding: “The government is working on a comprehensive taxation system, which will be implemented in the form of a flat tax as of 2018.” Last week, Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło told private broadcaster TVN24 that she could “imagine a situation” in which the government could back out of the plan to introduce a flat tax. She also said the tax-free threshold might be less than the PLN 8,000 promised by President Andrzej Duda, adding that the government still has three years to the end of its term to make changes to the tax system.
