Cutting taxes is impossible in wartime

This was stated by Yaroslav Zhelezniak, first deputy chair of the Verkhovna Rada committee on finance, taxation and customs policy, at the congress “Public finance system reform – the path to Ukraine's recovery,” organized with the support of CIPE.

“It is easy for me to tell you that we will cut taxes in half, but, unfortunately, I think that is impossible. And, unfortunately, I see the budget figures and understand that we are already short by UAH 300-400 billion without additional mobilization,” he said, reports FinClub.

In 2025 the problem will only get worse. “Next year, most likely, the gap between the required and the available international financing will be $10-15 billion that will be missing. And we can hope for a long time that a miracle will happen, but, as practice shows, even this year those hopes were not always encouraging. So supporting business this year is a condition for survival next year,” he said.

The only tax cut that business is asking for is a reduction of the burden on the payroll fund. “It is proposed to restrict the payroll FOPs in a simple way. This is bill No. 5054-1, developed together with Halyna Tretiakova,” noted Oleh Hetman, coordinator of the expert groups of the Economic Expert Platform. The document provides criteria for separating employment relationships from freelancing.

By his calculations, reducing the burden on the payroll fund to 20% in total (without de-shadowing effects) would cost the state UAH 178 billion. But there could be additional revenues of UAH 66 billion.