The Great DIFFICULTY

A week ago, the State Tax Service had a pleasure of watching reaction (https://www.facebook.com/SFSofUkraine/posts/4561705990530022) of our neighbors and colleagues from the State Fiscal Service to the publication in a television story as an example of their “work” in Main Directorate of the STS in Kyiv region: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKSjYz9vyc0

Reaction turned out to be extremely nervous and rough: colleagues complained that they were slandered, misunderstood, weren’t heard and in general – all these were the enemies’ machinations due to the competition for a Chairman position of the Bureau of Economic Security (widely used abbreviation is BEB). Apparently because of excessive excitement, they began to confuse events, facts and documents, remember imported cars which were found by their analysts, through which they allegedly made a shock-assault visit to Main Directorate of the STS in Kyiv region and complain that the STS does not want to help them in their difficult task, hiding information from them and refusing to communicate.

As good neighbors, we decided to help the SFS and recall facts and their sequence, to fulfill their wishes regarding publication of “the numbers of hundreds of outgoing letters sent to the SFS” (and even more), especially considering that we honestly waited for the Honorable Chairman to present our views and plans on the commission for election of the BEB Chairman, so we do not influence the competition at all.

So we suggest everyone who wants to see the most interesting – those “two sheets of paper” from the STS, in which the latter “informed about the possible illegal activities of two companies – car importers”.

It is easy to see that the “two sheets of paper” were only a cover letter sent to the SFS with electronic annex, contents of which the STS (subject to the requirements for maintaining confidential information) provides to read today. By the way, there were two such letters, so we also publish the second.

For those who were frightened by the endless columns of numbers and labels, we explain that letters contained information collected by the STS’s employees about activities of a number of companies – car importers, which later sold them to individuals but tax invoices indicated that these cars are assembled or mostly the spare parts were sold to other VAT payers thus forming a tax credit for these payers. Employees of the STS not only identified signs of such activities in the analysis of risky business operations but also carried out a preliminary collection of evidence, establishing a list of individuals who purchased imported cars (as far as we know – intact, not in the form of kits for assembly). These materials were handed over by the STS to the law enforcement agency, which is the SFS. We are even afraid to guess what the SFS analysts "established" after that, but further direction of the SFS activity is now well known to us from their own publication: the SFS has decided that unpaid taxes and related state budget losses are not as interesting as break the STS’s door.

Perhaps, professional talents of our colleagues simply did not allow them to locate something better hidden than buildings of Main Directorates of the STS, so the next six months they, according to their own explanations (for which we are sincerely grateful), devoted to exciting appeals and summonses for questioning. As a result, while the SFS simulated a tumultuous activity, taxpayers whose operations were a subject of the STS’s analysis have recovered from the first shock, realized that the SFS did not threaten them, so they began to save their ways of earning, massively challenging their recognition as meeting the risk criteria (resulting in the suspension of registration of their tax invoices) and trying to force the STS to register these tax invoices.

Due to the highly professional work of analytical and legal departments of the STS, some of such attempts were prevented (for honorable supporters of the theory of illegal suspension of registration of tax invoices as a tool, we inform: yes, the STS is learning to win such cases and has the first successes) but risks to the state budget remain high.

With this in mind, the STS takes a number of measures to direct unrestrained activity of our colleagues from the SFS in direction of protecting economic interests of the state. If colleagues do not object, the SFS is ready to inform the public about them. Similarly, if desire of our colleagues to “publish hundreds of letters” remains unchanged – we are ready to continue to acquaint society with the most interesting of them, as well as with events that have happened and are happening around them. Staff of the STS has every reason to be proud of working results, ready to demonstrate them at any time and therefore we do not need to anonymously merge documents through another information “dump” to attribute other people’s achievements.

As for the complaints of our honorable neighbors that we ignore their requests, we remind them that the current criminal procedural legislation of Ukraine obliges the investigating authorities not only to collect evidence, but also to do so legally, otherwise such evidence will simply be ignored by the court. Legal way to obtain confidential information about taxpayers in criminal proceedings is a temporary permission to access things and documents granted by the court. This simple rule has already been understood by all law enforcement agencies and only colleagues from the SFS for some reason believe that “some animals are more equal than others”.

We sincerely hope that this is due solely to their lack of awareness in the criminal process and not to a conscious desire to allow the other party’s lawyers in court to simply remove evidence from the trial and ruin the whole case. We also hope that those colleagues who will get a job at the BEB will pay enough attention to learning the basics of criminal procedure and developing skills in working with documents and will not miss the electronic application in the cover letters, so as not to look frankly awkward when such “two sheets” will illustrate their public reports of unprecedented successes in analytical work.

P.s. Colleagues, we understand that you have a competition, a DIFFICULT situation and all that but please return the laptop and phone to our employee. It is enough for you to tell only that you transfer materials to us – the person needs to work.

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