The State Tax Service of Ukraine has uncovered a large-scale scheme of falsifying financial documents in a well-known national chain of household appliances and electronics stores, which encompasses about 150 retail outlets across the country. According to tax officials, the retailer systematically concealed actual sales volumes from the state, allowing them to evade significant tax payments.
This is reported by Finway
How the Shadow Scheme Operated in the Retailer
According to the tax service’s data, the chain employed a business fragmentation scheme: dozens of individual entrepreneurs (IEs) operated under a single brand using a simplified taxation system. The main violation was that a significant portion of financial transactions bypassed official accounting – these amounts were not reflected in reports and were not recorded on fiscal servers.
Control Purchases and Use of Counterfeit Software
The exposure of the scheme became possible in March during a series of control purchases. Tax officials established that customers in the stores were issued receipts that merely imitated genuine financial documents. For this purpose, sellers used special software that generated fake receipts from the software registrars of settlement operations (SRPOs). None of these transactions were transmitted or recorded on the SFS server, making tax control over actual sales volumes impossible.
During inspections, inspectors documented over 20 instances of issuing counterfeit financial documents. In addition, violations of labor legislation were discovered: at least six employees in the chain were working without official registration.
“The amount of fines for the already identified violations may reach approximately 3 million hryvnias.”
Currently, tax inspections in the stores are ongoing. After the procedures are completed, all materials will be forwarded to law enforcement agencies for further investigation. It is worth noting that earlier in February, the State Financial Monitoring Service uncovered a large-scale scheme for legalizing funds involving so-called drops.