Business news from Ukraine

The European Business Association (EBA) supports the idea of a systematic fight against smuggling and solving problems at customs, but considers a useful tool for this to be a reduction of the demand for illegally imported goods in the domestic market due to fiscalization and increased fines for the non-issuance of fiscal checks, as well as the mechanism of cashback, the association said in a release on Wednesday.
“A useful tool for solving this problem may be to reduce the demand for illegally imported goods in the domestic market of Ukraine. This can be achieved by strengthening control over the use of cash registers and gradually expanding the scope of mandatory use of payment transactions recorders,” Senior Manager of EBA Consumer Electronics Committee Viktoria Kulykova said.
According to her, the European Business Association has already asked the President to pay special attention to this issue, in particular – to prevent the weakening of reform and strengthen control and punishment for violations of legislation in this area.
According to the association, in the absence of fiscal checks and effective control over their issuance, unscrupulous entrepreneurs begin to evade the necessarytaxes and customs duties.
“Therefore, there is an urgent need to create transparent, equal, and civilized conditions for doing business, including the introduction of European practices for the fiscalization of payment transactions,” the association said.
However, the EBA representatives are convinced that the situation can be further improved: in particular, by increasing the fines for non-issuance of fiscal checks and introducing a mechanism to motivate customers to verify the authenticity of fiscal checks, the so-called cashback.
According to the EBA Consumer Electronics Committee, the volume of illegal imports of certain product categories amounts to 50-70%. To understand the scale of the problem, the Ukrainian budget loses about UAH 33-35 billion annually because of smuggling (UAH 11-14 billion from illegal petroleum products, UAH 7 billion from machinery, UAH 12 billion from alcohol, and about UAH 7 billion from medicines).