ANKARA – The Turkish government has announced a plan to raise about $5 billion for defense procurement through a conscription exemption fee.
The plan exempts from military conscription all Turkish men older than 28 as of Jan. 1 who pay a lump sum of 18,000 Turkish lira (about $8,150). Turkey requires every male citizen over the age of 20 to serve five to 12 months in the military, depending on his education.
The government said more than 600,000 people qualify for the scheme. A government spokesman said most of them are expected to take advantage of the paid exemption system.
If all qualified Turks opted to pay the exemption fee, the government would raise around $5 billion from the system and create a major source of future funding for modernization and acquisition programs.
"The money we will collect from this exemption will directly be transferred to our Defense Industry Support Fund to be used as part of our efforts to adopt a technology-intensive army," Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in a speech in parliament Dec. 2.
Turkey's procurement agency, the Undersecretariat for Defense Industries (SSM), collects annual receipts through the fund. It consists of revenues from levies and indirect taxes on alcohol, tobacco and gambling and had been widely speculated to amount to $1 billion annually.
Ealier this year, the SSM said the revenues it collected from the Defense Industry Support Fund in 2013 totaled $1.479 billion compared with $1.306 billion in 2006, much less than the all-time high of $2.896 billion in 2008.
More importantly, SSM said the fund's accrued but not yet collected revenues from the Treasury amounted to $5.7 billion at the end of 2013. The Treasury could pay that amount to the SSM in installments, or SSM could take payment in the form of Treasury backing for future loans. ■
Email: bbekdil@defensenews.com.
