Oleksandr Tsyvinsky, Director of the Bureau of Economic Security, outlined the main shady practices that cause the state budget to lose hundreds of billions of hryvnias every year. These are large-scale schemes — from the illegal market for excisable goods to conversion centers and salaries "in envelopes" — that continue to be the most latent part of economic crimes in Ukraine.
According to Tsyvinsky, counterfeiting and illegal circulation of excisable products alone take away more than 50 billion hryvnias from the state every year. Added to this are violations of customs rules, manipulations with export-import operations, and smuggling, which generate another 150 billion hryvnias in losses. A separate segment remains the activities of conversion and transit centers — according to BEB estimates, this is another 40–50 billion hryvnias of shadow income.
The largest amount of underpayments, the head of the Bureau emphasizes, is associated with tax evasion through the payment of salaries "in envelopes" and the use of individual entrepreneurs as an optimization tool. This segment, according to preliminary estimates, amounts to 250–300 billion hryvnias per year. "It is very difficult to calculate what is not taken into account. But the preliminary calculations are as follows," Tsyvinsky noted.
He emphasized that these schemes do not simply reduce state revenues - they form a parallel economy that is not controlled by state institutions. According to the BEB, the strategic task of the body is to, together with other services, "pull" these hundreds of billions out of the shadows and return them to the budget.
Tsyvinsky also drew attention to the difference between public procurement, which is already in the field of view of journalists and law enforcement officers, and hidden tax manipulations. In his opinion, society often sees only those abuses that have a specific figure and a specific object - for example, an overstated cost of road construction or repair. But the "phantom" part - funds that did not reach the budget at all - has much less chance of attracting attention.
" You will never see what hasn't been received there. It's like a phantom. And what hasn't been received there is hundreds of times more than what society's attention was focused on ," the head of the BEB concluded, emphasizing that it is this latent area that is the most difficult, but also the most important for the work of law enforcement officers.
