Accounts Receivable (Overpayment) in Negative Environmental Impact Fees. Offset? Refund? Forget? Understand? Forgive?

In the current context of planned increases in negative impact fee rates and the strengthening of supervisory authorities in several areas, the issues of high-quality administration of payments for negative environmental impact (NEI) are becoming highly relevant.

The basic principles of paying for negative environmental impact are described in Article 16.4 of Federal Law No. 7-FZ dated January 10, 2002 (as amended on December 26, 2024) "On Environmental Protection," while the procedure for offsetting and refunding payments is established by Order No. 334 of the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources (Rosprirodnadzor) dated June 20, 2019. By and large, it can be said that the current payment and administration system has existed with constant changes since 2016.

And it would seem that the field is developing and being regulated... but! The stumbling block has been the issue of making advance payments. Natural resource users with an "uneven" production process, expanding operations, or those implementing efficiency measures and reducing their negative impact inevitably face the need to offset or refund overpaid funds generated by advance NEI payments. In some cases, this amounts to hundreds of millions of rubles.

Discussing this aspect of the relationship between economic entities and the supervisory authority, it is impossible not to mention that until December 27, 2019, we all had only one method available for making quarterly advance payments: ¼ of the amount accrued for the previous year. This inherently generated huge overpayment amounts for certain entities. At the same time, the offset and refund procedure was only approved on June 20, 2019. Add to this the time required for the payment administrator to fine-tune the processes, the established deadlines for reviewing key execution documents, and we get the risk of unrecoverable funds.

Current judicial practice signals this issue. One striking example is the court decision in case No. A33-27628/2024 dated October 14, 2025, where a natural resource user was denied a refund of an overpaid advance amount of 93 million rubles.

More from judicial practice (Information borrowed from the Promecolog Telegram channel):

"According to one case, the inaction of the Rosprirodnadzor (RPN) Directorate regarding the offset and refund of 136 million rubles was deemed lawful, as the Company missed the three-year statute of limitations for the claims (this concerned the 2016-2020 period; the Company filed applications in 2021 and 2022, but only went to court in 2023)."

"In another case, RPN lost: also due to missing the statute of limitations, demands for an additional assessment of 80 million rubles were declared unlawful."

"The most striking case we have encountered recently is how in 2025 RPN managed to recover almost 400 million rubles in fees for the failure to implement a discharge reduction plan in 2016-2017. The court indicated that for violations in implementing the plan, a 20-year statute of limitations applies, equating it to causing harm to a water body."

Since 2020, we have had 3 options for making advance payments:

• ¼ of the accrual for the previous year
• ¼ of the established standards (if they are established)
• based on actual data from industrial environmental control (IEC).

The entire system of calculations, reporting, and payment administration is a separate area of the environmental craft, and it is impossible to describe all the intricacies in one article. However, I would like to outline the main deadlines and key footholds for your confident actions:

• offsets and refunds are performed within the same BCC and OKTMO;
• the statute of limitations for refunding an overpayment is 3 years. The date is calculated from the date of the payment order;
• the standard timeframe for Rosprirodnadzor to review a reconciliation report is 30 days;
• the standard timeframe for reviewing an application for the offset/refund of overpaid fee amounts is 3 months;
• the standard timeframe for reviewing a declaration on NEI payments is 11 months.

It is worth noting here that the combined duration of these three purely administrative processes already exceeds 1 year, which is more than 1/3 of the statute of limitations.

Based on the experience of victories and losses in this field, here are the following useful practices and tips:

• The method of making advance payments in the amount of ¼ has significant drawbacks; it is better to choose making advances based on IEC data.
• You have the opportunity to evaluate and choose the most advantageous method once a year — "before" and "during" the submission of the payment declaration. For each type of negative impact, it is recommended to compare all 3 advance payment methods based on production data and select the most profitable one.
• In the absence of a constructive dialogue with the payment administrator, feel free to go to court for an offset/refund. Currently, officials of supervisory authorities show a tendency not to take responsibility for decisions, shifting this process into the realm of judicial rulings.
• If there is an imbalance between BCC or OKTMO in payments, send notifications to clarify the details of payment orders, "transfer" payments between different details, and offset them (available only within a single legal entity). RPN may refuse, but in fact, such a possibility exists through interaction between RPN and the Treasury.
• Reconciliation report — perform this after each payment or accrual (up to 6 times a year). Always have an up-to-date reconciliation report on hand.
• Create a payment database that includes: NEI declaration data, accounting data, and payment administrator data. Generate the initial accounting and RPN data based on trial balances. Consider all attributes: amounts, dates of payment orders, declaration type (primary/corrective), accrual period, OKTMO, BCC, etc. Correlate all three sources along a timeline, by affiliation with the facility with negative environmental impact (FNEI), and by payment and reporting periods.
• Experience shows that in some territorial departments of RPN, there is a practice of offsetting NEI overpayments beyond the 3-year statute of limitations, but not for refunds.
• Eliminate tabular calculations in Excel. Implement and use proven environmental software products. (You can observe the overview and selection principles in the materials of the case I presented as part of my participation in the TOP-100 rating).

And may the force be with you!