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Starting from the 17th of November, at ‘Kurilka’ forum on www.tourdom.ru there is a discussion of a possible change of the form ‘Tour-1’. This registration form which contains the information about a tour and at the same time confirms the payment for the trip has existed for 9 years. A new variant of the form, according to the decree of the government №171 as of 31.03.2005, should appear not later than on the 1st of January, 2007. According to the provisional data it will no longer confirm the payment for the trip to a travel agency. This can only be confirmed by a sales check which is used by agencies at the moment only if they wish to, as both documents (a registration form and a sales check) are equal.
As for effects of the substitution of ‘Tour-1’ by sales checks for travel firms, there are different opinions. Some people believe the novice will bring up a lot of routine troubles: companies will have to pay (from $200 to $800) to buy cash registers as well as time for registering it in a tax service. What is more, they will have to make quarterly payments (approximately 1500 roubles) for maintenance. These consequences are not serious. Besides, many travel agencies already own a cash register’, says Dmitry Cherepanov, a lawyer.
Others believe that the change to a new report system will cause a stricter control over book-keeping and, therefore, a reduction of the percentage of travel firms who have half-illegal business.
‘There will be less options for frauds’, believe Yuriy Grigoriev, director of ‘Orko-tour’.
Still, some experts doubt the effectiveness of it as a means of fighting with half-legal business. ‘If talking about full-fledged legal work, it is necessary that all documents are correct, for example, there should be a unified form of the agreement corresponding to the Civil Code between an operator and an agent. At the moment this document varies at different companies’, said an anonymous to a BANKO correspondent.
Nevertheless, tour agency representatives are very careful with a possible change partly because they do not see the necessity for the change. ‘Of course, nothing depends on us: if they adopt the regulation, we will follow it. But I do not see any sense in working with checks, everyone is happy with registration forms.’ – says Anna Vorovatova, manager of a travel department of ‘Galileo-Rus’. Maria Kireeva, general manager of ‘Unicom’ travel agency agrees with her.
