“Markets benefit from transparency”: the head of the Federal Tax Service on the simplified tax system, the registration of miners and the fight against shadow employment

About the taxation of sellers

Starting in 2025, sellers using the simplified tax system will be able to trade on the markets and will transmit data on sellers’ income and expenses to the Federal Tax Service. Egorov believes that this tax regime “is very suitable for the business model of collaboration with markets.” Previously, to do business, “they created a legal entity and put many functions into it,” but now the markets have taken charge of logistics, customer communication, information delivery, delivery of goods and sales analysis , he pointed out.

In his words, today the interests of the Federal Tax Service and the markets coincide and consist of jointly managing the tax risks of small businesses. Egorov noted that “online platforms benefit from everything being transparent around them.”

As an example, the head of the tax office cited a situation where a seller sells the same niche product, reaches the maximum amount of income under the simplified tax system, “and then another company appears selling the same product,” which is why “the multiplication of this type of companies is beginning.” Egorov explained that the market can track “this story and correct it immediately”, otherwise “additional charges will be initiated, and the higher they are, the greater the risk of bankruptcy of the company and criminal consequences.”

About the registration of miners

Since November 1, the Federal Tax Service has been maintaining a register of cryptocurrency miners. Only listed companies and individual entrepreneurs can legally mine digital assets. According to Egorov, the service has so far received 150 registration requests. The head of the Federal Tax Service noted that there is no increase in activity, “everything is going quite calmly, calmly” and “that’s even good.”

“This is a complex story and there are several phenomena at the same time. Registration of conditional data centers and registration of the miners themselves. There is a question of interaction with the Ministry of Energy on energy management. This is a separate story that you have to learn to work with: where mining is allowed, where it is not allowed, where the energy system is overloaded. Somewhere miners usually work with gas: they connect and generate electricity through gas,” Egorov explained.

He added that a separate tax system is also provided for individuals and legal entities that mine cryptocurrencies, “so all this needs to be implemented very carefully, slowly and step by step.”

On the fight against shadow employment

The head of the Federal Tax Service said that in Russia there are problems with shadow employment, but they are different, “it is impossible to paint them with the same paint.” The service continues to fight against this phenomenon, checking, for example, salaries and reacting if they are paid in a “strange” way, he assured.

Egorov identified two approaches to combating shadow employment. The first option is to “transfer all the money to the bank accounting system.” “When all money passes through a transparent system, such solutions will already appear there, there will be a tectonic shift in terms of tax transparency,” noted the head of the Federal Tax Service.

The second approach can be achieved by accessing information that is already in the banking system. However, this needs to be handled carefully, because “if you suddenly enter the banking system,” you can “squeeze more people out of cash,” which is not strategically beneficial for the regulator, Egorov noted.

“On the other hand, we can carefully modify the reality that exists from the point of view of p2p transfers and see what happens there. For example, we can turn to banks and say: we see that such or such actions are risky; install your own compliance systems or your KYC (Know Your Customer) systems in such a way as to control the transparency of these payments,” said the head of the Federal Tax Service.

At the same time, he stressed that decisions on interaction with the banking sector “must be considered very carefully, because they affect a large number of people.”