Entrepreneurial activity is always associated with risks. Sometimes they are so high that the entrepreneur is forced to abandon business for some time. Usually in such cases the question arises of how to suspend the activities of an individual entrepreneur.
Nuances of legislation
Without further ado, we would like to clarify right away: the suspension of the activities of an individual entrepreneur at the request of the business owner is not provided for by law. He can only stop his activities completely. Moreover, this can happen either voluntarily or forcibly. But he has no right to “freeze” work due to an economic crisis, an unstable market situation, illness, lack of funds and other reasons.
Way out
So, how to suspend the activities of an individual entrepreneur if it is not permitted by law? There are only two legal ways out of the situation. Which one to choose depends on when approximately the entrepreneur plans to return to commercial activities. If he plans to abandon commercial activities for a long time, it makes sense to completely close the individual entrepreneur. The fact is that you can voluntarily deregister and re-register as many times as you like - the law does not provide for any restrictions. Therefore in in this case It is enough to fill out the appropriate application form and take it to the registration authority.
If for him the suspension of the activities of an individual entrepreneur is a temporary issue, the businessman plans to soon return to commercial work, there is no need to officially close an individual entrepreneur. That is, formally you can retain this status, but in fact the activity will not be carried out. However, all the same obligations to the state must remain as if commercial activity was ongoing and there was income. The state supervisory authorities are not interested in the issue of their absence.
Responsibilities after suspension
So, what responsibilities remain with a businessman when the actual suspension of the activities of an individual entrepreneur occurs without its official closure? First of all, the entrepreneur is obliged to submit the necessary reports to the social insurance fund, the Pension Fund and the Federal Tax Service. Regardless of whether he has income, he must pay all the necessary payments and, above all, taxes. This is especially true in cases where the entrepreneur is on the Unified Agricultural Tax, PSN or UTII. Payments are made according to the rules assigned to the taxation system you have chosen. No matter what system the entrepreneur is registered on, he is obliged to pay contributions to the Social Insurance Fund and the Pension Fund.
If he continues to have employees, all relevant taxes must be paid. Here it is necessary to take into account all the subtleties of calculation wages, maintaining jobs. In addition, the businessman is obliged to continue to submit information about average number employees each reporting period. He must also continue to maintain an income and expense journal. Of course, such a solution is completely unprofitable from an economic point of view. But this will allow you to suspend commercial activities for some time without the procedure of closing the individual entrepreneur. That is, when he decides to return to commercial activity, he will not have to go through the registration procedure again.
Closing an individual entrepreneur
If a businessman decides to abandon entrepreneurial activity for a long time or suspend it for an indefinite period, it makes sense to completely close the individual entrepreneur. To do this, you need to provide the following documents to the tax office at your place of residence:
- Application form P65001 that you wish to close your individual entrepreneur. You can fill out the form by hand or print it out on your computer. The only rule is that there should be no corrections or blots on the paper, otherwise it will simply not be accepted.
- A receipt or any other payment document on the basis of which you can prove that you paid the state fee in full in the amount of 160 rubles.
- Not required, but a reference is recommended pension fund. By and large, tax officials can request this document from the fund themselves. Therefore, if an entrepreneur is denied closure due to the lack of this paper, such actions are considered unlawful. In addition, even the presence of debt to the pension fund is not a reason to refuse closure. The law allows this debt to be repaid even after the liquidation procedure, but within the period established by the Pension Fund. Otherwise, penalties may be applied to you.
You can pick up a document certifying the closure of an individual entrepreneur in five days at the same tax office. But the liquidation procedure does not end there. The former entrepreneur is given approximately two more weeks to report this fact to the Pension Fund, as well as to submit all necessary reports to the Social Insurance Fund.
Please note that if during his business activities he used cash machine, it must also be deregistered. Otherwise, you need to be prepared for serious fines. By the way, if the entrepreneur had a current account, it must also be closed.
After this, he can open the IP again at any time convenient for himself. The law does not set any time limit between closure and reopening.
There are times when profits are declining, there is almost no activity.
This may be due to the seasonality of the work performed, the crisis in the country, a drop in demand for the products offered, and other events.
Consequently, the FSS will also zero, you won’t have to pay any fees. If the option with this impossible– you need to think about the issue of paying employees in advance.
Their rights are under no circumstances should not be infringed. In this case, you will have to charge and pay contributions from salary, withhold and transfer Personal income tax and fill out reports to funds. Regardless of the availability of employees, the individual entrepreneur must pay for himself fixed contributions to the Compulsory Medical Insurance Fund and the Pension Fund.
Pregnancy and childbirth IP
A woman entrepreneur has legal right go to . Individual entrepreneurs are not insured by the Social Insurance Fund, so the expectant mother will be able receive benefits.
These are the following payments:
- For the birth of a child - 14,497-80 rubles, is paid once.
- For early registration at the antenatal clinic (up to 12 weeks of pregnancy) - one-time payment 543-67 rubles.
- Minimum benefits for child care up to 1.5 years – 2,718-34 rubles for the first child, 5 436-67 on the second and subsequent ones.
Benefit amounts are indicated for 2015. Amounts annually are indexed.
In order for an entrepreneur to receive maternity benefits from the social insurance fund, the following conditions must be met:
The amount will be calculated not based on the individual entrepreneur’s income, but based on , so it will be minimum.
According to Law No. 212-FZ on insurance premiums, an individual entrepreneur can be released temporarily maternity leave from contributions for yourself in the Pension Fund. Naturally, provided that no activity is carried out, no income is received by the individual entrepreneur.
It turns out that for a while an entrepreneur can suspend its activities. But you shouldn’t just wind up everything and continue to live as if nothing had happened. After some time, the IP may be waiting an unpleasant surprise in the form of a letter from the tax office or funds.
By the way, since the individual entrepreneur is not deregistered, then he is still is listed in the tax office. This means that he can be contacted at any time by checking. Therefore, it is worth keeping everything and reporting in order, even if the activity is temporarily not carried out.
ABOUT temporary suspension You can learn about the activities of individual entrepreneurs from the video:
Temporary suspension of the activities of individual entrepreneurs is an issue that worries many entrepreneurs. The main reason why people decide to work separately and register themselves as individual entrepreneurs is to legalize their earnings.
Human factor
That is, behind an individual entrepreneur there is only a person and the problem is that he is a person and it is common for him to get sick, move, travel, he may not have the necessary resources, or during this period the demand for his services may disappear completely. Therefore, the law provides for the opportunity for entrepreneurs to suspend their work if one of these situations occurs.
The Tax Code does not provide for the possibility of stopping filing returns as a result of stopping business activity. This rule is the same for all individual entrepreneurs, regardless of what mode they use.
It is very important for individual entrepreneurs to know that this information is relevant at the moment, because previously it was possible to stop maintaining tax accounting when the individual entrepreneur suspended work and submitted a corresponding application to the Federal Tax Service. There also remains the need to make mandatory payments to the Pension Fund.
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Procedural and legislative nuances
For those who are thinking about taking a break from work, it will be useful to know the procedural and legislative nuances of this decision. Because these nuances are such that if the current situation is not a short-term phenomenon, then it is much easier and cheaper to close the individual entrepreneur and not waste money.
From a bureaucratic point of view, a temporary cessation of activity does not entail any changes in the documents that guide the individual entrepreneur in his work. That is, the certificate of state registration of an individual entrepreneur, all its licenses, patents and other documents received specifically as an individual entrepreneur remain legitimate and can be used in the future.
As mentioned above, an individual entrepreneur who has temporarily stopped working does not stop paying taxes, fees and other mandatory payments, which must be paid regardless of whether he has income or not. However, an individual entrepreneur has some protection in tax matters, and there are restrictions on paying taxes that an individual entrepreneur who has temporarily stopped working does not pay. Individual entrepreneurs have this right under a simplified taxation system, and only on the condition that with the cessation of their work activity they ceased to receive any income.
If the entrepreneur still receives income (for example, under previously concluded agreements with clients), he retains all payment obligations.
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Tax accounting
If an individual entrepreneur does not conduct business, he is still required to maintain reports required by law, submit declarations and other reports. If there are also employees, then his obligations as an employer are also not canceled for the period of termination of work. All his duties stipulated Labor Code, employment contracts and must be carried out without violating the rights of workers. That is, payment of wages must be carried out in any case, like any other guarantees.
If a violation of the law occurs during this period, then the responsibility provided for existing entrepreneurs will be borne. An exception is made only for those individual entrepreneurs whose work stoppage was caused by illness or any other reasons that, by law, may temporarily limit his liability.
To the question of whether it is possible to suspend the activities of an individual entrepreneur, a clear positive answer can be given. However, this termination should be perceived more as a kind of vacation, during which most of the functions and responsibilities of the individual entrepreneur are retained, and not as a temporary cessation of obligations.
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What reports need to be submitted?
Based on the above, we can conclude that an individual entrepreneur who has suspended work is not assigned any special status.
That is, the procedural side of a temporary suspension simply does not exist. The tasks remain the same:
- submit reports on time
- pay taxes
- pay dues
The first document that needs to be submitted is information about the average number of employees. This data is submitted by all individual entrepreneurs without exception, even those who are not employers, therefore no exceptions were made for those who temporarily stopped working.
Information is submitted once for the expired tax period, that is, for the year, no later than January 20. The information form can be downloaded on the Internet or taken from your Federal Tax Service office.
Sometimes a situation occurs when an entrepreneur must suspend the business for a while without closing it completely. But is it necessary to notify the tax authorities and formalize the suspension of business in order to avoid fines? Stopping activities due to a financial crisis most often leads an entrepreneur to bankruptcy.
Suspension of activities individual entrepreneur means that he neither sells goods, nor provides services, nor produces products in any particular period of time. Report this to government agencies An individual entrepreneur, in principle, should not. The main thing for the Federal Tax Service is the timely deduction of taxes, as well as for the pension fund - the deduction of insurance contributions. As such, the term “suspension of commercial activities of individual entrepreneurs” does not exist in Russian legislation. Only complete closure of an individual entrepreneur and subsequent (after one year in case of bankruptcy) registration as an entrepreneur can be considered suspension. Stopping activities does not relieve the businessman of property liability, tax payment obligations, and reporting obligations. That is, he may not receive income for some time, but his status obliges him to act in accordance with the law. Many beginning businessmen do not have significant profits from their business for quite a long time after starting their business activities, but this does not exempt them from paying assigned amounts of taxes and filing declarations and other reporting.
Suspension of the activities of an individual entrepreneur does not require any official registration with tax or other authorities. The so-called zero reporting is submitted within the required time frame for the type of taxation system used. Off-budget funds charge insurance premiums in any case, is it being carried out economic activity or not. If an individual entrepreneur uses a patent system for collecting taxes or UTII, he is obliged to make tax contributions to the budget as before. If the simplified tax system or the main payment deduction system is used, taxes are not transferred by the entrepreneur, but only upon submission of the corresponding zero documentation confirming the non-receipt of profit for the specified period.
Suspension of the activities of an individual entrepreneur - an employer who has hired employees - does not affect contributions to the Social Insurance Fund for them. Even without making any profit from its activities, the individual entrepreneur still pays insurance premiums for all of his employees. Thus, termination of transfers for staff is possible only in the event of a complete termination of the management of the individual entrepreneur. Otherwise, the entrepreneur is obliged to comply with all the functions of a tax agent in relation to employees.
In most cases, there are no consequences when a business is temporarily stopped. The entrepreneur does not incur any liability in this regard. But, only in the case when a retired businessman continues to perform the functions of an individual entrepreneur in paying taxes, fees and submitting reports. Simply closing a business or closing a shop will not end the business. It is necessary to prepare all documents for closing an individual entrepreneur, register the termination of activities, make appropriate changes to the Unified State Register of Individual Entrepreneurs, and pay all taxes due. It is important to remember that registration as an individual entrepreneur is possible unlimited amount once at any time intervals. An exception is the bankruptcy of an entrepreneur, after which the law prohibits registration for one calendar year from the date of the court’s decision on the bankruptcy of an individual entrepreneur. If a businessman closes his business at will, then at any time after closing he can register again in this status.
From this we can conclude that a short-term suspension of business may not be formalized by closing the individual entrepreneur, while continuing to deduct taxes and insurance payments. If the suspension is associated with significant financial difficulties of the entrepreneur, then it would be more advisable to close the individual entrepreneur and, after the end of the crisis, register again in this status.
Suspension of the activities of an individual entrepreneur is an opportunity that must be used very carefully: the practice is that entrepreneurs who temporarily stop working, including for reasons related to a lack of financial resources, find themselves in an even more difficult situation, since they have not taken into account all the consequences.
How to suspend activities
Perhaps the most important question for entrepreneurs who want to step away from business for a while is: how to suspend the activities of an individual entrepreneur? Let us answer right away that Russian legislation does not provide for such a possibility in principle.
The current Civil Code of the Russian Federation and others proceed from the fact that the activities of an individual entrepreneur can only be terminated.
Therefore, if an individual entrepreneur does not conduct business, then it is impossible to document this in any way, that is, legally the fact that the entrepreneur does not carry out commercial activities does not arise.
Therefore, the temporary suspension of the activities of an individual entrepreneur comes down only to the fact that he himself does not take any actions aimed at making a profit. Moreover, the entrepreneur has the right to do this at any time from the moment of his.
In practice, there are often situations when a very long period of time passes from the moment of registration to the actual start of business. At the same time, the legislation does not contain any restrictions on the time of commencement of activity, as well as on the time of its implementation.
In other cases, for example, when using, payment of taxes is not provided, but only if the entrepreneur does not receive any income, which must be confirmed by submitting zero tax returns.
Suspension of entrepreneurship also does not relieve one from other obligations that are associated both with business and with the implementation of actions of an individual.
It should also be taken into account that if an individual entrepreneur has wage-earners, then he is obliged to fulfill the duties of a tax agent in relation to them, as well as ensure compliance with them labor rights in case of suspension of activities. Consequences of suspension of activities
A temporary suspension of an individual entrepreneur's business does not entail any legal consequences for him, but only if the current legislation was not violated during this period. In life, the situation develops in such a way that an entrepreneur, wanting to retire, simply winds down the business: closes outlet, mothballs workshops, etc. and begins to engage in other activities not related to entrepreneurship.
This continues until he receives a pile of notifications from the tax authorities about fines imposed on him for unsubmitted reports, untransferred tax payments and other mandatory fees. At the same time, the individual entrepreneur has not been operating for a long time.
It is useless to sue in such a situation, since the Federal Tax Service is right in such a situation: while a citizen is considered an individual entrepreneur, he bears all the responsibilities provided for such status, and the actual termination of activities is not a basis for termination of the duties of an individual entrepreneur.
Let us remind you that the law does not provide for any declaration of termination of the activities of an individual entrepreneur; there is only the possibility of termination of activities on the basis of an application from the individual entrepreneur himself or by a court decision, in cases established by law.
In this regard, the answer to the question whether it is possible to suspend the activities of an individual entrepreneur is as follows: an entrepreneur can stop engaging in entrepreneurial activity, but at the same time he retains the powers of an individual entrepreneur, which entails the retention of all his duties.
This option is possible when a break in activity is not planned for a long period. In another situation, it is advisable to terminate your registration as an individual entrepreneur, otherwise such suspension can lead to serious consequences.
Temporary suspension of the activities of individual entrepreneurs: Video
