Salaries in envelopes
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2025 9:39 am
Abuse of privileges is also quite common, in particular, disguising the import of industrial batches of goods into the customs territory of Ukraine as postal and courier shipments or under the guise of personal import or transportation of personal belongings; movement of goods in small batches within the permitted import quota.
The annual volume of potential smuggling and gray imports is in the range of UAH 270–450 billion . The special database state budget loses about UAH 80–150 billion from this group of schemes .
The scheme is quite simple: the employee is paid the official minimum wage, paying the corresponding minimum taxes and fees, and the remaining funds are paid unofficially - in an envelope. However, there are several variants of such a scheme:
payment of labor from the "black cash" generated by the company itself;
use of conversion centers;
use of “pseudo”-FOP in group 3 to obtain cash;
calculating the salary of one or more senior managers in such a way as to reduce social security contributions, etc.
The estimated losses to the budget and pension fund from these abuses range from 110 to 150 billion UAH per year (with the estimated shadow turnover from these schemes: 220 – 260 billion UAH per year ).
Offshore schemes
This involves using all possible permitted “cross-border” methods of reducing the tax burden, in particular, by:
exploitation of discrepancies, conflicts and gaps between different national taxation systems, as well as preferential taxation of certain types of activities or income.
The annual volume of potential smuggling and gray imports is in the range of UAH 270–450 billion . The special database state budget loses about UAH 80–150 billion from this group of schemes .
The scheme is quite simple: the employee is paid the official minimum wage, paying the corresponding minimum taxes and fees, and the remaining funds are paid unofficially - in an envelope. However, there are several variants of such a scheme:
payment of labor from the "black cash" generated by the company itself;
use of conversion centers;
use of “pseudo”-FOP in group 3 to obtain cash;
calculating the salary of one or more senior managers in such a way as to reduce social security contributions, etc.
The estimated losses to the budget and pension fund from these abuses range from 110 to 150 billion UAH per year (with the estimated shadow turnover from these schemes: 220 – 260 billion UAH per year ).
Offshore schemes
This involves using all possible permitted “cross-border” methods of reducing the tax burden, in particular, by:
exploitation of discrepancies, conflicts and gaps between different national taxation systems, as well as preferential taxation of certain types of activities or income.