Expert: Hetmantsev gives enough tools to make tax authorities feel like "masters of life" and create problems for business

Tax officials consider themselves "masters of life" who can create problems for any business. They have enough tools for this purpose, provided by lawmakers, first of all, the chairman of the Tax Committee of the Verkhovna Rada, Danylo Hetmantsev. This was stated by political expert Serhiy Gaidai in an exclusive commentary to UNN.

Olena Sosiedka, co-owner of JSC Concorde Bank, previously stated that after the decision to liquidate the bank, a tax audit was conducted, which resulted in a report worth UAH 700,000, but on the instructions of the head of the Verkhovna Rada Tax Committee, Danylo Hetmantsev, they "illegally added" UAH 392 million. In particular, she said, the tax authorities, under pressure from Hetmantsev, decided to charge VAT on the bank's financial transactions and commission income, which are not subject to this tax under the law.

Mr. Gaidai noted that the tax service in Ukraine is very large in size, with at least 70,000 people involved in tax collection. In his opinion, this number of people is unnecessary.

"They (the tax authorities - ed.) consider themselves people who are masters of life, who can create problems for any enterprise, and they have enough tools to do so, which our lawmakers have provided them with. And Hetmantsev is number one, the person who gives them such opportunities. Because Hetmantsev's very concept of the state structure is that entrepreneurs are a criminal class that makes money illegally somewhere, hides it, and we need to do everything to squeeze all the money out of them," he said, commenting on Sosedka's statement.

According to him, it is the tax service that "maintains one of the largest corruption schemes.

"This is the so-called illegal VAT, and Hetmantsev gave them such a tool as an illegal, unconstitutional opportunity to withdraw VAT from entrepreneurs... Only customs officers, who also have their own schemes, can be compared to them. And so, realizing that they are the masters of life, that they have a political roof - Hetmantsev and other MPs, such as Zheleznyak and others - they act like this," the expert says.

In his opinion, it is necessary to dismiss almost all tax officials and to remove any possibility for the state and officials to interfere in economic activity through lawmaking. Mr. Gaidai emphasized that there are at least two ways to collect taxes. The first one is the way individual entrepreneurs do it, and the second is that the banking system can be the best tax agent, when all transactions are made by banks and tax is withdrawn from the card.

Recall

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy promised to limit the potential for any possible pressure on "white", legal businesses and to introduce a three-month de facto moratorium on procedural actions that could block the work of an enterprise. After that, on January 23, he enacted the NSDC decision on urgent measures to ensure economic security under martial law.