2 million dollars a month. Ex-military officer speaks about Hetmantsev's involvement in corruption in the tax service

There is a corruption scheme in the tax service, according to which regional tax officers collect bribes, pass them on to the management, who in turn gives part of the money to the head of the tax committee of the Rada, Danylo Hetmantsev. This opinion was expressed in an exclusive commentary to UNN by Yuriy Hudymenko, a former military officer and leader of the Democratic Ax party.

"Judging by the complaints from business that I, as a public figure, receive and have been receiving for many years, I actually know that they (entrepreneurs - ed.) call Hetmantsev the person who is at the top of this pyramid of corruption in everything related to the tax service as such. That is, they are sure that in order to resolve high-level issues with the tax service, they need to go to Mr. Hetmantsev or his entourage one way or another," Gudymenko said.

In addition, according to him, representatives of large and medium-sized businesses are telling us that "the tax authorities, when they collect bribes at the lower, so to speak, regional levels, part of it is passed up to the top management, the top management passes it to Kyiv, and part of what they pass to Kyiv ends up not only with the tax authorities, but also with Mr. Hetmantsev.

Gudymenko noted that preliminary analysis showed that Hetmantsev could receive up to $2 million a month in this way. "Based on the figures we were able to simply estimate and divide somehow, we believe that Hetmantsev's corrupt income may be in the region of $2 million per month, we estimated it, it is very cautious," he said.

Gudymenko added that he and his team of lawyers tried to understand how the SMKOR system works, which blocks tax invoices because they are risky.

"We have actually drawn up a flowchart of how the system works and how it should work according to the resolution that regulates the system. According to the flowchart we have drawn up, it turns out that the work we see is completely inconsistent with how it should work according to the resolution," he said.

According to him, an analysis of the work of the SMSKOR revealed that despite the statements of the tax authorities that the system operates in automatic mode, in fact, tax invoices are blocked manually.

"Right now, the tax office needs money - it blocks a certain number of invoices that, for example, it did not block yesterday because there was no need to - the plan was being fulfilled... It's very similar to the way the traffic police used to work in our country: in the morning you can be kinder, thinking that you will catch someone else and hand over the plan to your bosses. In the evening, you realize that you are 100 dollars short of the plan, and you start stopping cars for any violation or even without any violation. This adds neither stability to the system nor justice to the country, and only provokes corruption," said Gudymenko.

Recall

At the end of May, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine instructed the Ministry of Finance, the State Audit Service and the State Tax Service to conduct an audit of the tax invoice blocking system within six months. However, in June, a new wave of tax invoice blocking began in Ukraine.

Add

Blocking of tax invoices is one of the main problems that Ukrainian entrepreneurs complain about in the field of tax administration. In general, according to the Business Ombudsman Council's statistics  , 57% of complaints from business representatives in the third quarter of 2023 concerned tax issues. According to MP Mykhailo Tsymbalyuk, blocking tax invoices has become a serious problem that threatens Ukraine's national security, as it stops the activities of enterprises and disrupts economic operations.

As noted  by business ombudsman Roman Vashchuk, the problem for business is not even the level of taxes, but the style of administration. He also added that the tax and customs authorities lose 90-94% of their cases in courts, either in the first instance or on appeal to the Supreme Court.

According to experts, this situation with the courts indicates that the tax authorities are abusing their powers, as the courts are breaking down these decisions. Some, such as economic analyst Pavlo Sebastianovych, directly calls these "schemes.

Among the main such schemes, he names fictitious exports, registration of fictitious VAT from fictitious companies, export of goods under fictitious documents with fictitious VAT and refund of real VAT, twists, blocking tax invoices, granting risky status to an enterprise and organizing shadow schemes to remove this status.

Dmytro Oleksiyenko, a member of the Taxpayers Association Board, believes that MP Danylo Hetmantsev, head of the Verkhovna Rada Tax Committee, is behind this administration policy, as no important decisions are made at the State Tax Service without his knowledge. And he actually runs the tax office through his former assistant Yevhen Sokur.

At the same time, Mr. Hetmantsev called his activities in relation to the tax service "parliamentary control." He also rejected accusations that he was taking over the powers of the executive branch, saying that he was simply helping entrepreneurs.