Small business owners operating as individual entrepreneurs (IE) may come under increased scrutiny from the tax authorities in 2025. Certain categories of individual entrepreneurs carry heightened risks of audits due to the nature of their activities or violations of key legislative requirements.
This is reported by Finway
Main Risk Groups Among Individual Entrepreneurs
Lawyer Bohdan Yankiv identifies several categories of entrepreneurs that may provoke the interest of regulatory bodies.
1. Individual Entrepreneurs Without Fiscal Receipts. Entrepreneurs who accept payments through electronic payment systems, such as NovaPay, are required to document such transactions using cash receipts or fiscal invoices. Even if not all individual entrepreneurs are obliged to issue settlement documents, the tax authorities have access to information about all transactions processed through payment systems. The regulatory body may check the compliance of amounts, the presence of a cash register, the timeliness of receipt issuance, as well as the accuracy of income declaration and other aspects of operations.
2. Individual Entrepreneurs Not Complying with Salary Requirements. From October 1, 2025, sellers of excise goods must adhere to a new requirement regarding the minimum average salary level: no less than 12,000 or 16,000 hryvnias depending on the place of activity. This applies to individual entrepreneurs engaged in the sale of alcohol, cigarettes, and fuel. If the tax authorities discover non-compliance with this requirement, the license for trading excise goods may be revoked. Entrepreneurs need to conduct an audit of the salary fund; in the absence of employees, they must pay double the unified social contribution and prepare documents confirming payments.
Additional Risk Factors for Entrepreneurs
3. Individual Entrepreneurs Without Primary Accounting of Goods. Regulatory bodies pay special attention to businesses engaged in selling electronics, as electronics are considered high-margin products. The tax authorities check for the presence of shipping documents for each batch, the accuracy of bookkeeping, the compliance of stock balances with actual data, the origin of goods (official suppliers or “grey” imports), as well as the correlation between purchase documents and sales volumes.
Identified documentary violations may result in a fine of 100% of the value of sold goods.
Given the high prices of electronics, fines can be significant even for the absence of just one invoice.
4. Individual Entrepreneurs with Suspicious Cash Transactions. This category includes entrepreneurs whose use of cash registers is accompanied by anomalous statistical indicators, which may indicate manipulation of income. In particular, the tax authorities pay attention to an excessive percentage of product returns, as such schemes are often used to cover up fictitious sales. Another marker is an abnormally low percentage of cash transactions. For retail, the average level of cash operations is 40–60%. A significant deviation from this norm may indicate the concealment of revenue without conducting operations through a cash register (RRO).