YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Increase of tax burden in Armenia cannot happen without the consent, encouragement or mandate from the people, caretaker PM Nikol Pashinyan said at a press briefing today, addressing the latest discussions over the idea of introducing a universal revenue declaration.

“Let’s forget the approach when the government says something has to happen this way, period”, he said.

“The idea of a universal declaration was discussed in the logic of combating shadow [turnover]. This doesn’t mean that whoever is submitting a declaration must be taxed additionally. We have double tax treaties with numerous countries, and now we want to have similar laws with everyone. We will not double tax our citizens in no case for this,” he said.

He said that recently Republicans are taking every chance to take advantage of a moment of misunderstanding regarding certain issues.

He slammed misinformation that he has allegedly said that the people are lazy, emphasizing that he has said that “the people weren’t allowed to work”.

“Indeed, the previous political system has encouraged poverty. It was beneficial for them for people to be poor. They would go and show a 10,000 dram bill before elections and the voter would view an [illiterate] candidate for lawmaker to be divine,” he said, referring to vote buying practices in the past.

“The [illiterate] political team not knowing the letters is today accusing our ministers in misspellings.  If we were to give a dictation to your lawmakers and ministers 70 % of them would drop out,” he said.

 “They think they will succeed in developing a public opinion through fake social media accounts. We won’t allow this, we will destroy all fake pages with our single truth,” he said.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan