The year 2013 could be the last for which the Croatian public pays the HRT fee in the current manner. The fee will not be abolished, unfortunately, but it will no longer be paid by everyone who has a receiver, nor will everyone pay the same amount.
The amount of the fee would depend on income, and it would not be paid, for example, by the unemployed. – The reform of the HRT fee, certainly not its abolition, will definitely be one of the key topics of discussion on media policy that is intensifying, confirmed Milan F. Živković, chief media advisor at the Ministry of Culture, to Novi list.
The reform should be an integral part of the new media legislation that this government has announced and is working on extensively to be adopted as soon as possible in 2013. The good news for HRT is that the Ministry’s position is that the starting principle of this reform should be that HRT’s revenue from the fee – which is about 96 million kuna monthly – does not decrease.
The second principle, as Živković says, is that the fee should no longer be a kind of ‘flat tax’, but that its amount depends on the income level of the taxpayer.
– This would, obviously, mean that the fee is paid individually, and the obligation to pay no longer arises from owning a receiver or computer in the household, but simply from the fact of residing in Croatia. A person with higher income would pay a higher fee, while a retiree, for example, or an unemployed person would pay a lower or no fee at all. In other words, for a hypothetical household of two people with exactly average income, practically nothing would change, except that instead of the current eighty kuna, both would in the future pay forty each, explains Živković.
