Macedonian Civic Platform

New opportunities for financing the civil society organizations

One of the biggest problems the civil society organizations are facing is their sustainability, especially now that some of the foreign ones have left. In such conditions, it is recommended that they turn towards the private sector. With the new Law for donations and sponsorship in the public services, the donors and the sponsors are given certain tax deductions for the donations they give, thus promoting the concept of social accountability with the business sector. This Law is one of the opportunities for using the domestic resources by the civil society organizations. A number of other examples of tax paying incentives are known in the world, deductions for donating in the civil sector.

In order to better inform the civil society organizations on the Law, the Foundation Open Society Institute Macedonia has organized a workshop on: “Law on donations and sponsorship in the public services”. The workshop took place in Veles between 24-26 January. The information regarding the Law was presented to the attendees by Mr. Slavko Lazovski and Mr. Borce Smilevski. 27 representatives of the Macedonian Civic Platform attended the workshop, which is part of the project “Supporting the National Civil Society Forum/Platform”, financed by the EU. Besides improving the informing on the Law, some joint activities for lobbying and advocacy were planned at the workshop.

The Law has not become active in practice yet. It takes some training/education on how to apply it in practice for that to happen. The organizations are still not familiar with the Law regulations, which narrows the opportunity for practicing them, as well as for lobbying and advocacy for adequate legal solutions and creating mechanisms for their application. The Law was passed in a quick procedure, without broader participation of the civil sector. Its implementation is to start in January 2007; in the meantime, conditions for its application have to be created.

Participants at the workshops have also discussed and commented on the working version of the Rulebook for implementing the tax incentives for the value added tax (VAT) for donations in the public services, which was prepared by the Ministry of Finances in December 2006 and on the opportunity for the civil society organizations to get involved in the creating other books of rules, such as: a rulebook on implementing the tax incentives for the personal tax and a rulebook for implementing the tax incentives for the profit tax and a rulebook on implementing the tax incentives for the property tax.