Head of an accounting firm: virtually every third VAT payer faces blocking of tax invoices
Kyiv • UNN
In fact, one in three VAT payers faces blocking of tax invoices, says the head of an accounting firm
Since November 2022, the trend of blocking tax invoices has increased significantly. As Iryna Bratkevych, director of the accounting firm Prime Group Ukraine, told UNN, in a commentary, virtually every third VAT payer among their clients faces this problem.
Businesses in such sectors as trade, construction, agricultural companies, and carriers most often face problems with the tax authorities.
We serve a lot of companies that are VAT payers. In fact, one in three faces VAT blocking, to varying degrees - some of them very massively, some not so much, but one way or another they face it. The trend in blocking has increased significantly since November 2022
In addition, she said, many companies are included in the risk category. According to Bratkevych, the classification of a company as risky is a violation of the presumption of innocence.
"At first, they accuse you of being guilty, of being risky, but you collect documents and prove that you are a real company, that you are working. Even companies that have been working for years with the same counterparties, providing the same services, suddenly become risky or have blockages, which is very strange, out of the blue. There, the head of the Customs and Tax Policy Committee, Danylo Hetmantsev, explains it all: not enough taxes have been paid, not enough resources, give us more hired people, but it is almost impossible to fulfill all these requirements given that there is a war going on, and companies are already barely coping, some are barely afloat to keep what they have and at least get the customers they have," Bratkevych says.
The accountant assumes that tax invoices are also blocked on certain grounds (for example, insufficient payment of the unified social tax in relation to a certain volume of transactions, according to the tax authorities) - such invoices are probably blocked automatically by the program, and invoices with large amounts are also blocked manually. Bratkevych even points out that if there are several invoices for large amounts, the two with the largest amounts will be blocked.
She says that she has not directly encountered the issue of riskiness or blocking invoices bypassing the law. However, she has heard that there are such ways.
"We did not communicate directly with such people, because our principle is to provide these documents legally. But we have heard from some of our clients that there is a certain percentage, they negotiate and set conditions. In addition, there were even phrases such as "don't even try to submit documents for withdrawal from risky ones, because no one is being withdrawn now, you can only withdraw in this way, by agreement. Or you can go to the courts and prove it for years." It's clear that not everyone is ready to go to court to prove their innocence if they have money hanging in the balance and can't wait that long. That's why sometimes people go to such lengths," Bratkevych said.
Recall
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. As noted by Business Ombudsman Roman Vashchuk in a recent interview , the problem for business is not even the level of taxes, but the style of administration. He also added that tax and customs 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 it "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 manages 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.
