If there is readiness for real dialogue, we will respond. If there is formalism and a tripartite monologue, there is no point.
This is how BIA Vice President Maria Mincheva answered the question of whether employer organizations will participate in the meeting of the National Council for Tripartite Cooperation planned for this Thursday. She was a guest on BNT’s “Referendum” programme, where, together with the other participants (Lyuboslav Kostov – Chief Economist at CITUB, Dimitar Sabev from the Economic Institute at BAS, and financial experts Emil Popov and Stoyne Vasilev), she took part in a discussion on the draft State Budget for 2026.
Maria Mincheva emphasized that the draft budget does not propose reforms but rather mechanically collects higher revenues from taxes and social security contributions in order to cover accumulated deficits resulting from short-sighted policies. The BIA Vice President recalled that for years not a single problem of Bulgarian business has been resolved. As an example, she pointed to the long-standing unresolved issues regarding the facilitated import of workers from third countries, the methodology for calculating the “household waste” fee (a problem more than 20 years old), and a number of other matters the business community has been expecting solutions to for years.
Instead, the new state budget foresees an increase in the tax-insurance burden, as well as additional administrative burdens for businesses—without prior debate and in contradiction with the current Medium-Term Budgetary Forecast (MTBF). The MTBF adopted in the spring of this year envisages an increase in social security contributions of 1 percentage point in 2027 and another 2 percentage points in 2028, while the draft budget sets a 2-percentage-point increase as early as 2026.
