Certain provisions provided for in the draft finance law (PLF) 2023 raise a wide debate among various professionals of the liberal sector. There are lawyers on the one hand who refuse certain tax provisions, and liberal doctors on the other, who contest the increase in corporation tax (IS) or the withholding tax for clinical management also provided for in the PLF 2023. Is the government taking an approach of “witch huntby introducing these tax provisions? Point.
Under discussion within the hemicycle, the PLF 2023 provides for the increase of the IS to 20% for companies making an annual net profit of less than 300,000 MAD. An increase which concerns liberal doctors, but also community pharmacists who believe that this increase will harm the middle class and will aggravate the situation of certain practices.
That said, and for doctors working in practices, most are declared as natural persons, who pay the patent at the end of the year, after completion of the balance sheet, income tax (IR) .
According to a union source familiar with the matter, who preferred to remain anonymous in view of the stressful atmosphere observed among professionals after the publication of the PLF, the problem does not arise at the IS level, which concerns more companies, such as clinics or laboratories, etc., but arises at the level of withholding tax.
Indeed, in addition to the increase in the IS provided for in the PLF 2023, the latter also provides for a deduction at source on each medical act carried out by a liberal doctor in clinics. The latter, and if this tax measure passes at the level of the two chambers of Parliament, will be obliged to retain 20% on the act carried out by the doctor in question.
However, some doctors, especially those working in the public sector, and operating in the private sector within the framework of the TPA (full-time arrangement), who only rarely declare their acts within the planned clinics, will be obliged to do so, since the clinic, for its part, will be forced to proceed with the deduction at source.
“Within the framework of the TPA, several medical professors in the public sector, particularly at university hospital level, work in private clinics. Most of them do not declare a penny of what they receive in private, except for crumbs. What will change now is that a doctor who works in a clinic, performs a surgical act, and that for example his fees are 5,000 Dhs, instead of taking them in full, integrating them into his balance sheet ( if he does) and do his accounts at the end of the year with the tax authorities, the clinic will take 20% of the 5,000 Dhs from him, as an advance on the IR”explains our source.
Now, public doctors who work in the private sector, the state will withdraw 30% from them, why? “Because their basic salary is 30 to 40,000 Dhs per month in the civil service. So they are already in the 38% of the marginal rate of the income tax scale (IR) for people generating more than 180,001 Dhs per year of tax benefit, without discussion “raises the trade unionist.
The problem for this category of doctors is not the 20 or 30% tax that will be deducted at source, specifies our source, but rather the transparency of acts and gestures carried out in the private sector and which are not declared. .
“When the clinic starts to deduct at source, the tax authorities are aware of your private income. For example, a surgeon who earns 800,000 Dhs per year in clinics, but declares nothing to the tax authorities. The withholding tax problem is a problem of procedure, not of rate“, supports our interlocutor, noting that the doctor refuses it because it opened the door to transparency.
MoroccoLatestNews.frtried to contact the president of the National Council of the Order of Physicians (CNOM), Mohammadin Boubekri, on this subject, but in vain.