Finance Ministry promised IMF tax changes and presented Rada with fait accompli – ’Servant of People’ Yanchenko
Ukraine's Ministry of Finance should first have held consultations with parliament and only then conducted negotiations with the IMF.
Halyna Yanchenko, an MP from Servant of the People and a member of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Economic Development, said this in a comment to Censor.NET.
The Ministry of Finance’s decision
According to her, the Finance Ministry should first have discussed with MPs how to optimize state budget revenues and expenditures, and only then reached agreements with the International Monetary Fund on Ukraine's commitments aimed at bringing Ukrainian legislation closer to EU norms.
"The architecture of the negotiations with the International Monetary Fund was wrong and ineffective. The Finance Ministry went to negotiate something with the IMF, promised them something without agreeing it with parliament. Then it came back and confronted parliament with a fait accompli: taxes on individuals and entrepreneurs need to be raised, and the fourth group needs to be de facto abolished. Obviously, this is a very unpopular decision and even harmful to the economy. That is why such an initiative found no support in the Verkhovna Rada either then or now," the MP said.
Yanchenko believes that there are currently more than enough sources of additional revenue for the budget to avoid raising taxes.
"The parliamentary Temporary Investigative Commission (TIC) for the Protection of Investors' Rights, which I head, has managed through its work to help bring an additional USD 1.5 million into the budget every month. This happened because customs began administering flower imports more effectively. We managed to bring this sector out of the shadows. Previously, 95% of the goods had been imported through 'grey' and even 'black' smuggling schemes involving evasion of customs duties and taxes. Now we can state that, since December, smuggling in this sector has effectively been eliminated. At present, based on international systems, we do not see signs of the old schemes returning. This is an example showing that there are sources from which more budget revenue can be obtained without raising taxes. This is what parliament keeps talking about. This is where the Finance Ministry is not hearing us," the politician stressed.
Rada will not support changes for individual entrepreneurs
Speaking about the new draft law on Ukraine’s key tax obligations to the IMF, published by the Ministry of Finance, she noted:
"My sense is that there is unlikely to be support in the Verkhovna Rada for the provision on transferring individual entrepreneurs to the regular taxation regime, that is, VAT administration. At least as of now, there is no such support. As for the taxation of digital platforms, the situation is quite specific. If we are talking about regulating platforms such as Uklon, Bolt, Glovo, Uber, and so on, there is generally an understanding of why taxation is needed here. Especially since they themselves requested such a regulation. Overall, I think the stumbling block in this legislative initiative was precisely the issue of taxing the OLX platform, as well as parcels. I believe a possible solution could be raising the threshold from which tax collection begins when goods are sold on OLX. Today, that amount stands at about two thousand dollars. Society sees this process as yet another attempt to collect some additional taxes. That is why there has been a certain public backlash. Some MPs are picking up on that and, accordingly, do not want to support such a legislative initiative."
What is known about the new draft law?
- This bill combines tax commitments to the IMF into a single document. Its adoption is a mandatory condition set by the Fund by the end of March 2026.
- The document provides for mandatory VAT registration for some simplified tax system taxpayers, as well as the introduction of automatic exchange of data on income from digital platforms and their taxation.
