Business Ombudsman of Ukraine Roman Vashchuk, in an interview with Yuridicheskaya Gazeta, shared his observations regarding the glaringly ineffective work of the country’s tax authorities.
“We have begun to analyze the functioning of Ukrainian tax audits. Now, analyzing data for the last five years, we observe the ratio of additional charges to actual budget revenues, which varies from 20:1 to 30:1.
As an example, taking the first 10 months of 2023, we see that 46 billion UAH were additionally assessed by tax audits, while only more than 2 billion UAH were received into the budget. Thus, we investigate the effectiveness of this system.
There is a hypothesis, although we do not yet have confirmation of the data, that, taking into account the payment of legal costs by the tax service in cases of lost cases... And in tax cases, losses range from two-thirds to 90%... Annual costs for legal funds amount to 350-400 million. Together with the expenses of tax officials for conducting audits and the work of the judges who process all this, there are unconfirmed suspicions that the state is operating at a loss,” Vashchuk shared.
This message was commented on by Kostya Proshinsky, known in the telegram channel under the pseudonym Grandfather.
“When will the government finally realize that the current state of affairs in the tax service is absurd? Why are we holding the entire apparatus? In total there are about 30 thousand people. And they operate at a loss, in addition, paralyzing the activities of enterprises in wartime. During the 10 months of 2023, the tax service issued fines in the amount of 46 billion. However, in most cases the courts were lost, so only 2 billion in fines were sent to the budget. The fiscal authorities also paid half a billion hryvnia to reimburse the plaintiffs’ legal costs, essentially paying for the services of lawyers hired by the enterprises. If we also evaluate the labor costs of the tax office itself, then the state ended up at a loss,” Proshinsky noted.
