Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Derecho Público "Dr. Humberto J. La Roche"
de la Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Políticas de la Universidad del Zulia
Maracaibo, Venezuela
Esta publicación cientíca en formato digital es continuidad de la revista impresa
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197402ZU34
ppi 201502ZU4645
Vol.39 N° 71
2021
ISSN 0798- 1406 ~ De pó si to le gal pp 198502ZU132
Cues tio nes Po lí ti cas
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avan ces o re sul ta dos de in ves ti ga ción en las áreas de Cien cia Po lí ti ca y De re cho Pú bli-
co, los cua les son so me ti dos a la con si de ra ción de ár bi tros ca li fi ca dos.
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nes Cien tí fi cas y Tec no ló gi cas Ve ne zo la nas del FO NA CIT, La tin dex.
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Vol. 39, Nº 71 (2021), 715-724
IEPDP-Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Políticas - LUZ
Recibido el 14/08/2021 Aceptado el 15/10/2021
Legal features of the use of big data in
the tax activities of the state
DOI: https://doi.org/10.46398/cuestpol.3971.43
Dmitriy Anatolyevich Smirnov *
Leila Emerbekovna Botasheva **
Razela Nesyurovna Denikaeva ***
Alexey Nikolaevich Leonov ****
Evgeny Anatolievich Pervyshev *****
Abstract
Objective: The article is devoted to determining the legal
nature of Big Data technology. Some aspects of the problematic
in the eld of using Big Data technology in public tax activities
are investigated. The theoretical and legal approaches to the
regulation of Big Data technology in domestic and international
law are analyzed. Methods: The authors used a combination of
methods: theoretical, general scientic methods and empirical
methods. Results: The development of the conceptual and terminological
apparatus and the harmonization of domestic and international legislation
is indicated as one of the possible directions for the formation of legislation.
Conclusion and recommendations: Active implementation of the activities
of tax authorities in the digital economy requires the adoption of adequate
legal decisions. The thesis that legislation must be formed considering the
legal and commercial nature of Big Data technology is considered. The use
of Big Data technology must be accompanied by legal and ethical standards.
Keywords: Big Data; tax activities, personal information; legal regime,
information security.
* North Caucasus Federal University, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8300-0828
** North Caucasus Federal University, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7704-2960
*** North Caucasus Federal University, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0662-9470
**** North Caucasus Federal University, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5007-5172
***** North Caucasus Federal University, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7799-6107
716
Dmitriy Anatolyevich Smirnov, Leila Emerbekovna Botasheva, Razela Nesyurovna Denikaeva, Alexey
Nikolaevich Leonov y Evgeny Anatolievich Pervyshev
Legal features of the use of big data in the tax activities of the state
Características legales del uso de big data en las
actividades scales del estado
Resumen
El artículo está dedicado a determinar la naturaleza jurídica de la
tecnología Big Data. Se investigan algunos aspectos de la problemática en
el campo del uso de la tecnología Big Data en la actividad tributaria pública.
Del mismo modo, se analizan los enfoques teóricos y legales de la regulación
de la tecnología Big Data en el derecho internacional. Los autores utilizaron
una combinación de métodos: teóricos, métodos cientícos generales y
métodos empíricos. El desarrollo del aparato conceptual y terminológico y
la armonización de la legislación rusa e internacional se señala como una
de las posibles orientaciones para la formación de la legislación. En las
conclusiones y recomendaciones se muestra que la implementación activa
de las actividades de las autoridades tributarias en la economía digital
requiere la adopción de decisiones legales adecuadas. Se plantea la tesis
de que la legislación debe formarse teniendo en cuenta el carácter legal y
comercial de la tecnología Big Data. El uso de la tecnología Big Data debe ir
acompañado de estándares legales y éticos.
Palabras clave: Big Data; actividades scales; información personal;
régimen legal, seguridad de la información
Introduction
The editor of the scientic journal Nature, Cliord Lynch, introduced the
concept of Big Data over twelve years ago, noting that digital information
has overtaken oil as the most valuable commodity in the world. Big data
is new oil; this similarity is determined not only by value. Raw data arrays
are just as of little use as raw oil, and companies that “extract” data quickly
become the most protable in the world (Sosnin, 2019). Cliord Lynch,
having discovered the Big Data phenomenon, proposed using this term
by analogy with the metaphorical expression “big oil” that is similar in the
English-speaking business environment (Lynch, 2008). It is indisputable
that today, data in conjunction with modern technologies for their analysis
modify economic, political, and legal relations.
The active digitalization of the economy has a direct impact on the
tax activity of the state, which is dened as “... the activity of the state in
organizing taxation and ensuring its implementation in order to meet its
need for funds” (Khudyakov, 1995: 55). Tax activity of the state in the most
simplied version is dened as the activity of the state in establishing,
imposing and collecting taxes and fees.
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Vol. 39 Nº 71 (2021): 715-724
The key point in dening public tax activities is public scal interest.
Now public tax activity reects the connection between the state, the
economy, public nancial interests and needs.
In the context of the digitalization of the economy, public administration,
and society, it is important to determine the priorities, forms and boundaries
of legal regulation, transformed and awaiting further transformation,
taking into account the use of information technologies.
Digitalization processes also have their drawbacks, primarily due to the
risk of disclosing personal information, information, in addition to speed,
eciency, accessibility and a number of other advantages.
World trends in the digital transformation of the nancial activities of
the state are manifested in the following: open development in government
departments and IT departments; open government data; machine readable
laws; websites of public authorities; development of digital administrative
codes; building a community of government IT developers; involvement of
CDO (Chief Data Ocer) specialists - the main ones in terms of data quality,
policy of their formation and implementation of data-based solutions;
training and retraining (Botasheva, 2018).
Today, there is a lot of incomprehensible for lawyers in the eld of
new information technologies. There are more questions than answers
in attempts to regulate digital relations arising, including in the nancial
sphere. Nevertheless, the future lies in advanced digital technologies, and
therefore the need to clarify the legal essence and use Big Data in state tax
activities in the digital economy will only grow and become more relevant.
1. Methodology
Analysis of publications shows that today there is no comprehensive
scientic research devoted to the use of Big Data in public activities of the
state in the formation, distribution, and organization of the use of state
funds. In modern conditions of development of the digital economy, which
creates the vulnerability of the legal regime of condentiality of personal
data, consideration of the legal protection of personal nancial data is
required.
The methodological basis for the development and implementation of
legal instruments for regulating Big Data in the activities of bodies engaged
in nancial activities is a set of research methods: theoretical methods -
analysis and study of regulatory acts that determine the implementation
and development of Big Data technology; theoretical analysis and synthesis,
analysis of the status of legal regulation of Big Data in Russia and the world,
methods of inference; general scientic methods - modeling of possible
718
Dmitriy Anatolyevich Smirnov, Leila Emerbekovna Botasheva, Razela Nesyurovna Denikaeva, Alexey
Nikolaevich Leonov y Evgeny Anatolievich Pervyshev
Legal features of the use of big data in the tax activities of the state
options for legal regulation of Big Data technology, analysis, synthesis,
generalization, systematization, classication; empirical methods -
observation, survey methods, monographic studies, methods of statistical
processing and qualitative analysis of the results of scientic research.
2. Results
Regulation of the Big Data technology in the domestic regulatory
environment should be formed based on a balance between the principle
of formal certainty of legal norms, on the one hand, and technological
development, on the other (Arkhipov and Naumov, 2016). The denition
of Big Data should be interpreted in a uniform manner to ensure consistent
and predictable application of the law, which at the moment is not reliable.
Big data requires independent consolidation in the current legislation,
dierent from the denition of personal data. The legislator needs to
develop new basic principles for the application of Big Data, based on their
versatility, innovation and commercial nature.
The digital economy is a data economy. Big data promises big socially
acceptable and desirable benets in state nancial activity (Silva, 2019).
Digital information has overtaken oil as the most valuable commodity in
the world. Big Data technology is inherently global and limitless; the study
showed a lack of uniform international norms and agreements regarding
which standards should govern the use of Big Data. To ll this gap, it is
important to adopt unied international agreements based on international
human rights law. International standards should contain legal and ethical
restrictions for the global commercial use of Big Data technologies.
3. Discussions
One of the main tasks of the national program “Digital Economy of the
Russian Federation” is to ensure favorable conditions for the collection,
processing, and storage of data. Humanity is at a new stage in its development,
which is seen as the fourth industrial revolution; and modern statistics
show that the amount of generated data is constantly growing. According
to expert estimates, the global data volume can reach 163-175 zettabytes by
2025 (this gure was 33 ZB in 2018), and their analysis becomes a tool for
making eective decisions in the eld of public administration, improving
the quality of public services provided, adjusting production and business
processes (Shuvalova, 2019).
Big data refers to the amount of information that cannot be processed by
traditional methods, that is, using a conventional computer in a short time.
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Special software and infrastructure - data centers, a network is needed to
work with them. Big Data technology solutions are equipment kits, software
and service kits.
The term “Big Data” does not have a universally accepted denition in
both jurisprudence and the information technology industry. A.I. Savelyev,
Senior Research Fellow at the Higher School of Economics National Law
University’s Information Law Research Laboratory, denes Big Data
as a set of tools and methods for processing massive and structured and
unstructured data from various sources subject to constant updates in
order to increase the quality of managerial decision making, creating new
products and increasing competitiveness (Savelyev, 2015). The above
denition reects, in our opinion, the legal nature and practical signicance
of Big Data.
Big Data technologies are universal in nature and can be used in various
elds of nancial activity. The potential advantages of using Big Data in the
nancial activities of the state are carried out both in imperative relations,
mediating the participation of the state in the nancial activities of the state;
these are budgetary, tax relations, relations in the eld of state insurance
and state credit, as well as dispositive nancial relations, which include
credit, settlement, insurance, investment, stock relations (Nefedov, 2013).
Central banks see the benets of using big data as a potentially eective
forecasting tool to support analysis of macroeconomic and nancial
stability. An analysis of monetary policy can benet from better and more
timely forecasts of macroeconomic indicators for the near future; it may
be useful for macro and micro prudential policies. The development of
technologies for processing and analyzing gigantic amounts of data today
determines the future of tax administration.
The information system of the Federal Tax Service of Russia today stores
and uses information from 4.8 million legal entities and 3.6 million existing
individual entrepreneurs. At the same time, the volume of the documents
presented by them only on VAT returns is about 2 Tb. In addition, the
Federal Tax Service of Russia aggregates and uses information received
from other departments; About one billion records come to tax authorities
per year (Matveeva, 2016).
There is a resonant bill “On a unied federal information register
containing information about the population of the Russian Federation.”
The specied register will contain a huge array of data, more precisely,
more than 30 types of information about a person - in particular, name,
date and place of birth, gender “and another gender if it changes”, marital
status, citizenship, information about registration with the tax authority
, including as a taxpayer of the tax on professional income, information
on registration as an individual entrepreneur, on military registration,
720
Dmitriy Anatolyevich Smirnov, Leila Emerbekovna Botasheva, Razela Nesyurovna Denikaeva, Alexey
Nikolaevich Leonov y Evgeny Anatolievich Pervyshev
Legal features of the use of big data in the tax activities of the state
registration in the systems of compulsory health insurance, social insurance
and the pension system, documents on education / study, qualications,
awards, deprivation, restoration of an academic degree / title, information
about parents / children, date and place of death.
It is not clear from the provisions of the bill how the information security
of the system will be ensured, because the data stored in it is of great value
for commercial use. In the era of Big Data (Big Data), one cannot ignore
the commercial value of the information that will be included in a single
information register. The question of the legal denition of Big Data
remains open, which causes uncertainty in the understanding of personal
data and their dierentiation from Big Data.
The unied federal information register falls under the jurisdiction of
the Federal Tax Service, which raises a lot of questions and indicates the
priority of scal, public interests to the detriment of private interests. Since
we are talking about personal information, the issues of ensuring privacy
and protecting the rights of subjects of personal data should be dominant
and decisive.
The obvious imperativeness of the provisions of the bill raises many
questions, indicating a bias towards ensuring public interests. The
compulsory nature of the processing of personal information about an
individual, from the moment of birth to information about the date of
death. An individual should not be deprived of the right to prohibit the use
of his own data. Just as in the case of the processing of personal data, it is
necessary to provide for the consent of an individual.
The reliability of information, methods and means of providing it raises
many questions. It also does not provide for the possibility of an individual
checking the reliability of his information.
However, the global problem is the lack of an independent normative act
regulating Big Data. Most countries, including EU countries, regulate their
personal data protection laws and are subject to the GDPR (General Data
Protection Regulation). The GDPR provides for the creation of a European
Data Protection Board, a European Inspector for Personal Data Protection.
There is centralized control over the application of the provisions of the
law, as well as uniformity of policy in the EU.
In our opinion, the existence of a supervisory authority is a situation that
deserves the attention of the Russian legislator, since the activities of the
Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecommunications of the
Russian Federation, Information Technologies, and Mass Communications,
covering only personal data, leaving Big Data without legal protection
mechanisms (Politou et al., 2019; Dautova, 2019).
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The lack of separate independent regulation of Big Data is compensated
in the European Union by the presence of an extensive interpretation of
personal data, including the denition of an IP address. It should also be
noted that in addition to the general provisions of the GDPR, the rules
regarding proling apply. “Proling” means “any form of automated
data processing for the purpose of analyzing and making assumptions
about various personal characteristics of an individual, in particular, his
performance, creditworthiness, economic situation, location, health, taste
preferences and behavior” (Article 4 (4) GDPR) (HSE university, 2018).
The denition of Big Data as arrays of information, the source of which
are various channels with a high transmission rate, are mentioned in the
Big Data Policy of the European Commission (Sosnin, 2019). Moreover,
data can be either created by people or generated by computers.
Because Big Data is primarily the personal data of the user; It should
be noted that the EU has positive experience in collecting certain types of
information in the provision of online services, in particular cookies. The
processing of cookies by users of online services is regulated by Directive
2002/58 / EC on the protection of privacy and electronic communications
(e-privacy Directive).
The provisions and experience of the European Union should play a legal
role in the regulation of Big Data, since Big Data has a high potential for the
economy and nancial activities of the state. The next important stage in
the development of technology should be the task of creating modern legal
tools that meet the requirements of the existing experience of individual
countries, including the European Union.
Conclusions and recommendations
The process of updating the tax law is now being observed. Modern
technologies provide fundamentally new opportunities, tax law is also
experiencing their impact. On the one hand, the technological process
and digitalization create opportunities for increasing the eciency of tax
mechanisms, on the other hand, such innovations can be interpreted as
new challenges for tax regulation. These challenges include: the balance of
public and private interests, protection of information and personal data.
Big Date in tax activities can be used primarily in scal interests for
forecasting, making decisions in tax administration, assessing the positive
and negative consequences of these decisions, and determining previously
hidden dependencies. Unfortunately, it should be noted that today the tax
service is only able to store data and deliver it upon request, without using
the huge potential inherent in the data that the Federal Tax Service of the
Russian Federation has at its disposal.
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Dmitriy Anatolyevich Smirnov, Leila Emerbekovna Botasheva, Razela Nesyurovna Denikaeva, Alexey
Nikolaevich Leonov y Evgeny Anatolievich Pervyshev
Legal features of the use of big data in the tax activities of the state
Tax activity in the digital economy, capable of providing high-quality
information and communication infrastructure and mobilizing the
capabilities of information and communication technologies for the benet
of taxpayers, business and the state, must undoubtedly transform and
change. The digital economy is a form of economic activity that emerges
from billions of examples of the networking of people, businesses, devices,
data and processes.
“The Strategy for the Development of the Information Society in the
Russian Federation for 2017–2030” determines that the digital economy
is an economic activity in which the key factor in production is digital data,
the processing of large volumes and the use of the analysis results of which,
compared with traditional forms of management, can signicantly increase
the eciency of various types of production, technologies, equipment,
storage, sales delivery of goods and services.
The digital economy is based on hyper-connectivity, i.e., the growing
interconnectedness of people, organizations, and machines, emerging
thanks to the information and telecommunications network Internet,
mobile technologies and the Internet of things. The industry of tax law and
legislation will have to face all the consequences of digitalization, which
are already generating fundamental changes in the models of economic
and nancial activity in leading countries. Digitalization should make the
taxation activities of the state more open.
The digitalization of government tax activities leads to the accumulation
of a huge array of tax and nancial data, which is used either to provide
consumers with new nancial services or to increase authority through
automatic compliance checks. The term “digitalization” is steadily associated
with Big Data. Modern policy is developing towards ensuring openness and
transparency of data in the nancial sector, requiring public authorities to
publish “open data” on ocial websites. This position is unconditionally
rational, since the entire digital economy is a data economy, but so far, the
issues of nancial and tax condentiality remain open. The right to nancial
and tax condentiality continues to be illusory.
The extensive collection and use of “large” tax and nancial data seriously
violates data privacy and protection, especially when these data are used in
smart algorithms to create digital personal proles or to make automatic
decisions that can only aect people. Ultimately, this practice of proling
tax and nancial behavior creates a fertile ground for discriminatory
treatment of individuals and groups.
The conclusion is substantiated that it is necessary to introduce a norm
for mandatory publication of information on leaks, compensation payments
and large penalties to bodies carrying out nancial activities as the most
eective mechanism of self-regulation, in which a sense of security policy
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Vol. 39 Nº 71 (2021): 715-724
appears, i.e., motivation to comply with the social responsibility of state
authorities for the security of Big Data.
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Nikolaevich Leonov y Evgeny Anatolievich Pervyshev
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www.luz.edu.ve
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www.produccioncienticaluz.org
Esta revista fue editada en formato digital y publicada
en diciembre de 2021, por el Fondo Editorial Serbiluz,
Universidad del Zulia. Maracaibo-Venezuela
Vol.39 Nº 71