Named the reasons why bloggers do not pay taxes on hundreds of millions

Among them – banal greed

The latest high-profile stories with bloggers suspected of astronomical tax evasion have brought this area of ​​private business to the forefront of the general information agenda. The layman has the right to ask: “Excuse me, where did tens, hundreds of millions of rubles of unpaid personal income tax come from? How is that even possible? What kind of money do these amazing people earn then? And why did the state take on them, feasting during the plague, only now?

Flights on business jets to anywhere in the world, buying luxury cars (the spouses Valeria and Artem Chekalina own five of these – Bentley, Lamborghini, Rolls-Royce and two Mercedes), apartments in Dubai, luxurious parties on the Cote d’Azur or the Maldives with the participation of top artists – this is today the standard of living for the nine richest Russian Internet coaches, who together earn billions of rubles a year. Tens of millions of users have subscribed to their Instagram pages (the social network belongs to Meta, which is recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation). The 30-year-old marathon queen Elena Blinovskaya, who was detained at the entrance to the Russian-Belarusian border, has 5.3 million subscribers. Back in 2020, Forbes estimated her annual revenue at 330 million rubles, since then revenues have grown, apparently, significantly. In 2021, the blogger noisily celebrated her birthday, the budget of which exceeded 120 million rubles.

“According to the investigation, Blinovskaya, while providing information services via the Internet, using the business splitting scheme, underestimated the income received and did not pay value added tax and personal income tax for the period 2019-2021 for a total amount of over 918 million rubles,” they said. in the Investigative Committee. Taking into account this undeclared amount, according to lawyer Mikhail Alekseev, Blinovskaya’s real income for three years amounted to about 6 billion rubles. And this is according to the most conservative estimates, based on the minimum tax rates applied to individual entrepreneurs. For comparison: exactly that much – 6 billion rubles – was allocated from the federal budget in the first quarter of this year for the implementation of national projects.

Approximately the same story with Chekalina: according to investigators, she, being an individual entrepreneur, applied a simplified taxation system (under which a businessman pays either 6% of income or 15% of the difference between income and expenses) with an allowable income limit of 150 million rubles in year. Her income from marathons exceeded this amount, and in order not to pay the tax service more, she divided the business between five family members (they are also IP), into whose accounts the money was received. This allowed Chekalina to evade taxes for 311 million rubles. According to experts, the scheme with the distribution of income over several individual entrepreneurs has been used by bloggers for many years. The Federal Tax Service has been closely involved in their bookkeeping since 2022: tax audits began in the spring and summer. The ground for this practice arose in 2018: then the Federal Tax Service and Rosfinmonitoring agreed on the prompt exchange of information on countering the legalization of proceeds from crime and the financing of terrorism.

“In all the high-profile scandals with bloggers, we see that they are charged with the same thing,” says Polina Gusyatnikova, senior managing partner at PG Partners. What does business fragmentation mean? This is when income intended for one person goes to several – relatives or trusted persons. It is divided in such a way that each of the recipients can remain on the simplified taxation system and pay the minimum tax at a rate of 6%, and not 15% or 20%, as is the case for those whose income exceeds 150 million rubles a year, depending on presence or absence of a legal entity.

Thus, it turns out that everyone paid taxes, but in a smaller amount than they should have. Now these schemes have been calculated and additional tax has been charged. Obviously, Gusyatnikova argues, in the face of an acute budget deficit, the state will tighten its fiscal policy. The most popular million-plus bloggers were taken for real, to show by their example what tax evasion threatens everyone else. There will definitely be accounting problems here, and this area itself is very promising for the Federal Tax Service: the lion’s share of the monetary result can be obtained not from the general mass of bloggers, but from several of the largest and most prominent ones.

“Of course, taxes must be paid. Moreover, the treasury needs to be replenished, – notes financial analyst Sergei Drozdov. – At the same time, our tax system should be simplified – today it is too cumbersome. The more money you earn, the more difficult it is for you to settle accounts with the state, and the Federal Tax Service, in turn, to administer business activities and conduct inspections. I am not making excuses for bloggers, but they are also avoiding taxes due to the extreme complexity and opacity of fiscal mechanisms. And the circle turns out not 13% of personal income tax, but clearly more, because of all kinds of deductions. Plus, banal greed works: when a person sees that he needs to part with a billion rubles, he starts cheating. In general, it was not bloggers who invented these schemes: they could have been suggested by accountants working in completely different areas of business.