International legal doctrines of unjustified tax benefits in the Russian legal order

The article examines the issue of harmonizing the rules of international legal doctrines in the field of identifying unreasonable tax benefits with the domestic national legislation of the Russian Federation. It is noted that the Russian law and order uses in the practice of tax legal relations, provisions and recommendations of almost all international doctrines: a step transaction doctrine, the predominance of substance over form (equity above the form), business purpose, cost reality, "one hand," "tearing down the corporate veil," actual place of activity. The main focus is on the first three, since everyone else is included in their content to one degree or another: the peculiarities of the implementation of each doctrine in the practice of Russian law enforcement are investigated. The need for constant interaction on international platforms of the Russian Federation with other states in the field of identifying unreasonable tax benefits is justified, since this problem is not only an internal national character of a separate state, but in the 21st century it has acquired transnational international meaning. This is due to the unprecedented opportunities in the history of mankind for freedom of movement of capital, people, goods and services, and therefore the emergence of international schemes for tax evasion or improvement of schemes for tax abuse. The article emphasizes the relevance of the affected problem, since its research contributes to the improvement of internal legal procedures for identifying malicious schemes for obtaining unreasonable tax benefits by the payer and makes it possible to gain national experience in the field of combating tax abuse.

As a result of the study, it is noted that the main forms of cooperation between the Russian and international law and order in the field of identifying unreasonable tax benefits are the harmonization of general anti-bias rules (GAAR), which include recommendations for combating tax evasion and doctrines that determine the criteria for identifying tax abuses in the actions of the payer in order to obtain unreasonable tax benefits. Being perceived by the Russian law and order, the provisions of international doctrines almost generally and invariably acquired the form of legal positions enshrined in judicial acts, federal laws and departmental regulations.

Conclusion. The criteria for determining an unreasonable tax benefit based on the essence and meaning of the doctrines – a transaction by steps, the predominance of substance over form and business purpose are as follows: 1) the transaction must have an economic essence independent and different from the purpose of tax cuts; 2) it is necessary to establish the true meaning of the operation by examining the entire chain of transactions of participants, since the assessment of such a transaction by itself, separately, does not allow to establish with certainty what goals it was aimed at; 3) when assessing the tax consequences of a transaction, the main fact that the court (or tax authority) considers is the actual relationship between payers (parties to the transaction), and not the external form that was deliberately given to such a transaction.

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