New wave of blocking tax invoices: the expert named the reason

Last week, a new wave of blocking tax invoices began – a tool that the head of the tax committee of the parliament, Daniil Hetmantsev, came up with to increase pressure on Business. The head of the #Savefop movement, Serhiy Dorotich, said in an exclusive comment to UNN that an audit of the risk monitoring system and criteria for blocking invoices appointed by the Cabinet of ministers could provoke it.

According to him, now tax invoices are blocked even with those counterparties with which they have never been blocked before. At the same time, the tax authorities do not provide businesses with information about why invoices are blocked "on the left and on the right".

Maybe this blocking is related to this (audit – Ed.). We are all adults and understand that this is a reason for reaping, corrupt transactions. And when there is an audit of such moments, the entire system simply stops. And we are afraid that it will simply be failures related to this proclamation that there will be an audit. perhaps now they (the tax authorities – ED.) are rewriting something, for example, some algorithm. To hide the transaction, or to make these transactions automatic. We do not know, we can only guess, understanding the quirkiness of the opinions of our officials and understanding how much corruption is currently in this issue. After the audit was announced, the problems worsened

Dorotich also said that the constant blocking of business tax invoices provoked the creation of several types of companies that earn money on unblocking.

"There are companies or just individuals who go out, call and represent a certain company and for a certain fee, which even sometimes passes as an official payment in the form of legal services, they are unblocked. This is one type of company – "reshala companies".  the second type of companies is those that provide legal support and support. These companies help prepare packages of documents that are submitted to the tax service for unblocking," he said.

The expert added that such companies charge "considerable" funds for their services in solving the issue of unblocking tax invoices.

The more regulated the system, the more profitable it is, firstly, for the authorities and those who control this system, and of course, legal, consulting, and accounting companies still earn money. This is what I have always opposed – the system should be as simple as possible, then we will not need this multimillion-dollar army of lawyers, lawyers, accountants. It is necessary to abandon VAT, introduce a tax on circulation, and then it seems to me that we will attract the number of labor resources not in the accounting sphere, but in the sphere of production, service provision, and so on

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 system of blocking tax invoices within six months .

Add

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

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

According to experts, this situation with the courts indicates the abuse of their powers by the tax authorities, because the courts break these decisions. Some, such as economic analyst Pavel Sebastianovich, directly call these "schemes".

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

Dmytro Alekseyenko, a member of the Council of the Association of taxpayers, believes that people's deputy, chairman of the tax committee of the Verkhovna Rada Daniil Hetmantsev is behind such a policy of administration, because no important decisions are made in the state tax service without his knowledge. And he actually manages the tax service through his former assistant Yevgeny Sokur.

At the same time, Hetmantsev himself called his tax activities "parliamentary control". He also rejected accusations that he is taking over the powers of the executive branch, pointing out that he simply helps entrepreneurs.