Self-Employed Citizens: The Concept and the Legal Regulation

One of the topics discussed at scientific conferences and considered in the legal literature in the past few years is the selfemployment of citizens. This article analyzes the use of the concepts of “self-employment”, “self-employed citizens” in current legal acts and judicial practice of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, on the basis of which it is concluded that there is no legislative definition of these concepts and a unified approach to their application in judicial practice. As a result of consideration of the points of view existing in the theory of law regarding the concept of “self-employed citizens” and persons who can be attributed to them, the opinion was developed that “self-employed citizens” is not a legal concept, but a general (collective) concept that denotes individuals independently providing themselves with work. An overview of the provisions of civil and tax legislation, as well as the legislation of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, regulating the activities of self-employed citizens is presented. Particular attention is paid to the experiment carried out in a number of constituent entities of the Russian Federation to establish a special tax regime “Tax on professional income”