Today, Comfy, one of the leading retail electronics chains in Ukraine, has two criminal cases. The Tax Service has issued documents worth almost 700 million hryvnias, which were the result of a planned audit, which was not completed in 2022. After the president lifted the audit moratorium last December, the IRS launched a full-scale invasion, according to Comfy officials.
Now another inspection has come out — in five years, from 2015 to 2022, TCU (transfer pricing) is being checked.
During December or January, I don't remember, there were 27 planned checks in stores across the country, where we were issued the same act, as if it were a copy, which did not apply to the Comfy network at all. Because the act referred to the fact that we do not put all the money in the cash register, to put it simply. This, in principle, is impossible, because the Comfy company does not work with a cache and has never worked. And in the smoking room, the tax officials told our employees that they had to write them off, otherwise everyone would go to war," Ihor Khizhnyak said.
He also added the blocking of tax invoices and the designation of his company as risky to the list of problems.
103 stores, 23% market share, 4,500 employees. The only company in the segment that has been working completely in the white field for 15 years, the second, according to Forbes, is a player in e-commerce, a completely transparent company that is listened to by the big four: for a long time it was Deloitte, now it is KPMG. And assigned the status of a risky company?
As our Dnipro tax officials say: we got a call from above, so we assigned you two hours later.
We say: OK, let's go to court, fight back. They: fight back, but in two hours we will appropriate again," described Ihor Khizhnyak. During 15 years of working at Comfy, he remembers such pressure from the security forces only during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, explained the CEO.
"But then there was no war. While we sit here and think, talk about this problem, people are dying right now, a very large number of people. And the lack of trust (in the authorities. - Ed.), it does not add..." - noted Ihor Khizhnyak.
However, he clarified, there were no attempts to "extort" a part of the business or demands for bribes.
But also a dialogue about how to attract money to the budget. "for two years, Comfy paid 2 billion 150 million in taxes. This is 170,000 FVPs," Khizhnyak noted.
