REUTERS
Some 129,000 individual entrepreneurs have filed to the fiscal authorities to remove them from registration lists, with more than half of them having reported zero commercial activity and no taxes paid, according to Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, ICTV reported.
"In January, 129,000 entrepreneurs were closed down. Their [registration] papers, so to speak… Of this number, 112,000 conducted no commercial activities. They just got registered and did nothing. But what does the law tells us? The law suggests that if you are an [individual] entrepreneur, you have to at least pay contributions to the Pension Fund. After all, when you finish your activities, you will come for a pension. And why should you have to take a working pension from someone who paid contributions?" Groysman said, according to ICTV.
Read alsoPresident signs law on moratorium on scheduled inspections of SMBs until 2017Groysman added that a total of more than 2 million businesses and entrepreneurs operate in Ukraine. "And there is no tragedy here," the head of government said, while commenting on the number of closed businesses. "Companies are being closed and opened. And here are the numbers: 16,800 enterprises closed down recently, while more than 23,000 new ones opened up. No negative trends here, but someone is always trying to impose an idea that everything is bad," said Groysman.
As UNIAN reported earlier, on January 1, certain categories of individual entrepreneurs, in particular, those from the second and third taxation groups, are obliged to pay a single social contribution of UAH per month, even no profit is reported. The first taxation group has an opportunity to pay half of the said contribution.
Read alsoPoroshenko legitimizes new taxes for individual entrepreneursSome experts call this provision counterproductive, since it may push in the shadows those entrepreneurs who conducted commercial activities from time to time and paid taxes whenever they saw profits. This innovation has led to the fact that the Ukrainian individual entrepreneurs in the last days of 2016 started to massively shut down their temporarily idle businesses.