The State Tax Service of Ukraine has uncovered a large-scale tax evasion scheme in two large retail chains specializing in the sale of Apple-branded equipment. The total amount of unpaid value-added tax amounted to more than 286 million hryvnias.
According to the head of the State Tax Service, Ruslan Kravchenko, the inspections covered more than 160 stores across the country. Tax officials found massive violations: sales without using cash registers (RRO/PRRO), lack of accounting for goods, and lack of documents confirming the origin of equipment.
During almost 150 control purchases, 22 cases of issuing non-fiscal checks — fake documents that imitate fiscal ones — were detected over just one weekend. According to Kravchenko, simple monitoring of the presence of controls in stores instantly affected sales volumes — they increased several times.
In total, over 400 inspections resulted in fines of over 85 million hryvnias for entrepreneurs. In addition, the tax authority forwarded materials to the Bureau of Economic Security regarding manipulations with the "crushing" of businesses.
The essence of the scheme was that legal entities allegedly divided sales among hundreds of related individual entrepreneurs who worked on a simplified taxation system in order to avoid paying VAT. 170 such individual entrepreneurs have already been identified, their total revenue reached 1.72 billion hryvnias.
These networks have now been transferred to the general taxation system in the form of LLCs. They have officially become VAT payers, and their recorded revenue has increased more than 10 times.
