The growth of fiscal control: how the intensity of inspections of individual entrepreneurs changed in 2025

In 2025, the State Tax Service significantly intensified its work with documentary inspections of individual entrepreneurs, demonstrating a significant increase in fiscal control over small businesses. According to the Opendatabot platform, during the first three quarters of the year, tax officials conducted 6,041 inspections — 12% more than in the same period in 2024. Although the indicator has increased, it is still almost four times lower than the pre-war level of 2021.

Analysts note that the geography of inspections demonstrates an uneven distribution of the workload between regions. The most frequent inspections were recorded in the Lviv region, where 805 inspections were carried out this year. Next are Kyiv with 715 inspections, Kharkiv region with 559, Dnipropetrovsk region with 518 and Khmelnytsky region with 433. However, it was Cherkasy region that topped the ranking in terms of the amounts of additional liabilities.

A noticeable trend in 2025 was a sharp increase in financial claims by the tax service to entrepreneurs. In total, over the three quarters, 5.98 billion UAH were additionally assessed to individual entrepreneurs — this is 2.6 times more than last year, and 25 times more than in 2021. However, analysts emphasize: high amounts do not always mean real budget revenues.

The actual level of agreed-upon liabilities remains low. As of the end of the third quarter, entrepreneurs agreed to only 22% of all additional assessments — this is 1.32 billion UAH. For comparison, last year, during the same period, they agreed to almost half of the amounts presented by tax authorities. The situation is similar with fines: out of the established UAH 2.59 billion, only 15%, or UAH 396.8 million, have been finally confirmed.

Cherkasy region became the leader in terms of the volume of additional liabilities, which here reached UAH 1.87 billion, with 72% of these amounts being fines. At the same time, the level of approval is one of the lowest in the country: only 1.7%, or UAH 31.3 million. A similar picture is in Dnipropetrovsk region, where out of UAH 1.5 billion, only 3%, or UAH 46.2 million, has been confirmed.

In contrast to these regions, the record for the effectiveness of approval belongs to Ivano-Frankivsk region. Here, entrepreneurs approved 94% of the proposed additional charges — UAH 19.85 million out of the total UAH 21.16 million. This indicator is the highest among all regions and demonstrates a much more productive interaction between business and tax authorities.

Overall, the results of the Opendatabot study show that despite the increasing intensity of inspections and the increase in financial claims by the tax service, the low level of agreed amounts indicates a significant volume of disputes between entrepreneurs and the state. This highlights the need to improve approaches to fiscal control and ensure a more transparent dialogue between business and tax authorities.