Individual entrepreneurs complain most about tax audits and unjustified fines

A survey conducted by the Sociopolis research company among individual entrepreneurs showed that entrepreneurs consider tax audits and unjustified fines to be the biggest restrictions on doing business, UNN reports.

Details

According to the survey, approximately one in three surveyed sole proprietors has faced any unjustified restrictions or obstacles from the state in conducting business as a sole proprietor in the past six months.

At the same time, 12.2% of respondents said that they had faced such restrictions and obstacles from the state to a large extent over the past six months, and 21.7% of respondents had faced them to a small extent.

The most common of these restrictions and obstacles imposed by the state on sole proprietorships were tax audits and unjustified fines (mentioned by 38.0% of respondents who had faced restrictions and obstacles from the state in conducting their business as a sole proprietor) and excessive bureaucracy of state authorities (35.6%).

When asked who among the representatives of the "economic bloc" of the state authorities has the most negative impact on the work and development of small and medium-sized businesses in Ukraine, the largest number of respondents named Danylo Hetmantsev (39.5% of all respondents and 57.2% of those who have not decided on the answer).

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Next, with a significant lag behind Hetmantsev, in the "rating" of negative impact on small and medium-sized businesses in the country (in the perception of the surveyed individual entrepreneurs) are Denys Shmyhal (11.2% of all respondents and 16.2% of those who have not decided on the answer to this question); acting Acting Head of the State Tax Service of Ukraine Tetiana Kiriyenko (10.7% and 15.5% respectively) and Acting Head of the State Customs Service of Ukraine Serhiy Zvyagintsev (9.3% and 13.5% respectively). No more than 6% of respondents named other heads of the "economic bloc" in response to this question.

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Reference

The survey will be conducted from December 10 to 18, 2023. Target audience - residents of Ukraine aged 18 and older who were registered as individual entrepreneurs as of the date of the survey. The survey did not cover the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, the city of Sevastopol, certain districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and other temporarily occupied territories where there was no mobile coverage by Ukrainian operators at the time of the survey. The method of the survey was CATI (Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviews) based on a random sample of mobile phone numbers of individual entrepreneurs. The sample size is 605 respondents. The sample is representative of the entire population of individual entrepreneurs in Ukraine by region of registration and main type of activity. The standard error without taking into account the design effect at the ratio of dichotomous variables from 0.1:0.9 to 0.5:0.5 with a confidence level of 0.95 does not exceed 2.4-3.9%.