Continuous reform process

The Azerbaijan government has always prioritized reforms for a qualified workforce, innovative production, sustainable growth, asustainable environment, and international cooperation for development.A sweeping reform process was started back in the early 2003 and is continuing even today.

With the purpose of creating favorable business environment for the development of entrepreneurship in the country andfacilitating the process of state registration of entrepreneurship entities, Ministry of Taxes of the Republic of Azerbaijan has beentasked with conducting unified state registration of entrepreneurship entities by the Executive Order No. 2458 dated 25 October2007 “On measures to ensure the organization of entrepreneurship activity on "one stop shop" principle”. With introduction of the"one stop shop" system, the start-up procedures in Azerbaijan reduced from 15 to 2, whereas time spent on it dropped from 30 to2 days. The number of registered individuals and legal entities has significantly increased since introduction of the system.According to Doing Business 2017, out of 27 reforms implemented in Azerbaijan in 2009-2016, 7 are related to registration and 5to taxation area. Distance to frontier score of Azerbaijan in "Starting Business" indicator made 97.75%, suggesting our country isin line with high standards in the world.Today, "Starting Business" indicator ranks our country 5thin the world and 1stamong post-soviet countries.In Global Competitiveness Report 2016-2017, our country climbed 3 levels up in comparison with the previous report and ranked37 among 138 countries, thus maintaining top position in the CIS region.Ministry of Taxes provides 63 electronic services to taxpayers, including services such as "Electronic VAT payments and refundsthrough single deposit account", "Acceptance of electronic tax invoice" (http://www.taxes.gov.az/modul.php?name=e-xidmetler).At the same time, the application of e-invoice (bill of parcels) has started since April 1, 2017.Individual entrepreneurs enjoy the benefits of being registered online without coming to tax authorities since 2011, whereas thesame applies to local legal companies (LLC) starting from 2012. Electronic registration of taxpayers is carried out throughelectronic signature (https://login.e-taxes.gov.az/login/).

An agreement on the exchange of electronic information between the Ministry of Taxes and the Ministry of Labor and SocialProtection of Population of the Republic of Azerbaijan was signed in February 2016 with a view to control electronic registrationof labor contracts concluded by employers.Tax Code of the Republic of Azerbaijan contains 129 tax privileges and exemptions. As a result of recent amendments andadditions made to the Tax Code with the aim of promoting investment and favorable business environment, the number of taxprivileges and exemptions has increased.

WB DOING BUSINESS REPORT 2020

EXPORT PROMOTION