Ekonomiczne Problemy Usług

The article refers to the reduction of corporate income tax rate recently introduced in Poland- 15% for certain small sized enterprises instead of the regular tax rate of 19%. The aim of the paper is to check, how widespread it is within the EU member states to use special income tax rates in order to support small sized companies. Due to the fact that a reduced tax rate has been introduced to the Polish corporate income tax system in 2017, an empirical analysis is carried out additionally. The purpose of this investigation is to provide empirical evidence according to the change in the tax burden of companies induced by rate reduction. The investigation is based on Amadeus database and it covers information from 2015 about 14.751 companies. Microsimulation method as well as descriptive statistics are applied. Additionally, some tax information provided by the EU institutions are analyzed. The research shows that for the entire analyzed group of enterprises the tax due decreases by 21%. Although this group is rather homogenous in terms of relatively moderate turnover, the tax burden diverges considerably across single firms. The tax saving resulting from rate reduction is unequally distributed. Before the reform, the majority of enterprises reveal the income tax not exceeding 10 thousands euro. Consequently, this group of companies increases to 84% after it.