Nikol Pashinyan Retreated on Declaration Topic, New Bill Under Development

The daily newspaper "Hayots Ashkharh" reports that starting November 1 of this year, citizens of Armenia, with the exception of pensioners, were required to submit a declaration, which deadline had already been extended from spring until November. Now, Nikol Pashinyan has retreated again and is no longer requiring people to fill out the declaration.

Why has the Prime Minister become more lenient? Nairi Sargsyan, the founder of the "I Am Armenia" initiative, publicly stated that out of 860,000 citizens, only 94,382 had completed the declaration. As of August 31, 2025, 94,382 people submitted a declaration for annual income declarations for 2024. More than 60,000 of these individuals simply repeated last year’s mandatory declaration, which means that only around 34,000 citizens have actually filled out a new declaration.

This means that only about ten percent of citizens filled out the declaration, which is a disgracefully low figure for the authorities. This is a significant blow to the ruling Civil Contract party and Nikol Pashinyan, and to avoid a total embarrassment ahead of November 1, they are considering introducing a new bill.

The newspaper has learned that the ruling party group in the National Assembly will soon introduce a new bill under "extraordinary" conditions, entitled "Simplification Procedure for Declaration," which will actually allow citizens not to enter the State Revenue Committee's website and simply not fill out the declaration.

As is known, next year, pensioners and other citizens are also required to join the declaration system, which adds an additional burden for every citizen. The Civil Contract party leaves it to the discretion of the Armenian citizen; if a citizen believes that aside from the visible information from the State Revenue Committee, they have no other income, they can even skip entering the system, and even after November 1, it can be considered that the citizen’s declaration has been filled out and submitted.

How? Quite simply. The information already available in the State Revenue Committee’s database will be automatically transferred to the declaration system based on the visible information that the State Revenue Committee has, and there will be no responsibility for not filling out the declaration.

Of course, the Civil Contract project will impose a fine on those individuals who have other income but do not declare it. This means that the responsibility lies with the same: they will be punished if it turns out that citizens have undeclared income from side jobs or funds received from spouses, relatives, parents, etc.

According to the newspaper, the ruling party is also providing the State Revenue Committee with the ability, with the citizen's consent, to obtain information about their received deposits and automatically include that in their declarations, so that the state can see what income the citizen is getting from their deposits.

It is worth noting that the motivational logic of the declaration has been preserved in the project: citizens who enter the State Revenue Committee's website and fill out a declaration will be able to benefit from social credits related to the return of 100,000 drams spent annually on health and education.

This retreat is, of course, a project aimed at not displacing citizens ahead of the 2026 elections. As for what will happen after Pashinyan’s re-election, it is not hard to predict: Pashinyan will not forgive the citizens' universal uprising and the rejection of his project.

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