The tax office requests documents as part of on-site tax audits. One of the goals is to whitewash the markets of influencer marketing and infobusiness, the income of whose participants can be measured in billions of rubles, experts say.
On Tuesday, March 7, the Investigative Committee of Russia (TFR) opened a criminal case against blogger Valeria Chekalina (ler_chek) and her husband Artem Chekalin (artem_chek). As part of the investigation, searches were conducted in the house of the spouses, they took a written undertaking not to leave the place. Later that day, the Moscow prosecutor’s office reported that Valeria Chekalina was charged with tax evasion in the amount of 311 million rubles, and Artem Chekalin was charged with complicity.
This is one of the most high-profile, but not the only recent case of tax audits on the Russian blogging market. Since 2022, the Federal Tax Service (FTS) has been actively checking opinion leaders and agencies cooperating with them. The fact that such checks have been going on since the spring-summer of last year was told to Forbes by sources in three different agencies that work with well-known influencers. Another Forbes interlocutor (in the blogging community) claims that agencies began to receive requests from the tax authorities to provide documents for working with bloggers from the end of 2022. “There were no such requests before, and if there were, then not in such numbers,” he says.
According to a Forbes source in one of the agencies that works with influencers, at least two large agencies received requests from the Federal Tax Service regarding tax evasion in 2022 – WildJam (including Dmitry Maslennikov, Klava Koka, Ilya Sobolev) and Didenok Team (Vlad A4, Katya Adushkina, Nikita Nagorny, Amina Mirzoeva). The Pravdorubka Telegram channel wrote about tax audits in these agencies in November 2022. WildJam and Didenok Team declined to comment. On Thursday, March 9, it became known that VK holding acquired 51% in Didenok Team.
The owner of one of the other Moscow advertising agencies told Forbes that his company also received requests from the Federal Tax Service throughout 2022. According to a Forbes interlocutor, the reason for the appeals was field tax audits by the Federal Tax Service of bloggers or their managers. “When checks are made with a blogger or manager, information is requested, including from the agencies that paid the blogger,” he explains.
Among the documents that the tax authorities asked to provide were agreements with the blogger’s IP, extending legal force from the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2021, acceptance certificates, invoices for payment, a media plan, final reports on these agreements, business correspondence, information about who is the administrator and the actual owner of the account, says the Forbes interlocutor. All these documents were listed in the corresponding requirement from the Federal Tax Service received by the agency (Forbes got acquainted with it).
In general, on-site inspections of individual entrepreneurs are an infrequent occurrence compared to desk audits, says Maria Kukla, partner at FTL Advisers law firm: “Usually, in the pre-digital era, such on-site inspections occurred when it was necessary to seize documents from individual entrepreneurs.” According to Maria Kukla, within the framework of such an audit, the tax authorities have more opportunities to collect evidence. For example, they can conduct interrogations, interviews of contractors, seizures, and examinations. In addition, if a desk audit involves studying a tax return for one year, then an on-site audit allows you to check all taxes for three years at once, the expert adds.
According to the owner of a Moscow advertising agency, in mid-2022, a request from the tax authorities as part of an on-site audit came to Dmitry Portnyagin, a blogger and founder of the Transformer business club with a total audience of 3 million people on YouTube and Instagram (owned by Meta, which is recognized as extremist and banned in Russia). And at the end of the same year, the agency received a similar request for an Instagram blogger, director of several celebrities and author of a social media promotion course Angelina Dubrovskaya with 1.2 million subscribers.
The representative of Dmitry Portnyagin, Natalia Sosnitskaya, neither confirmed nor denied the fact of the tax audit in 2022. “Like any Russian company, we are subject to regular audits and requests from the Federal Tax Service and other government agencies. 2022 is no exception. However, our checks and requests are not associated with frequent checks of other bloggers and agencies, this takes place systematically, as usual, ”Sosnitskaya told Forbes. She refused to answer questions about the reasons and results of inspections in 2022. Dubrovskaya did not respond to a Forbes request.
Earlier, the Federal Tax Service wrote about the fact that Portnyagin was waiting for a “large-scale check” on the Telegram channel “112”. He also named other potential testees – the author of the “Marathon of Desires” Elena Blinovskaya with 5.3 million followers on Instagram, blogger and founder of the cosmetics brand Sammy Beauty Oksana Samoilova with more than 15 million subscribers. A spokesperson for Blinovskaya declined to comment. Forbes sent a request to Samoilova.
In June 2022, Alexandra Mitroshina, another blogger with 4.2 million subscribers and the author of the Instalogy course, spoke about the demand of the Federal Tax Service to pay 200 million rubles of debt on her Instagram page. “I always work honestly, in white, with no intention of deceiving the state,” she wrote then. A spokeswoman for Mitroshina declined to comment.
Forbes sent requests to the Federal Tax Service and Rosfinmonitoring. A Forbes source close to the Federal Tax Service said that the department has a special department for identifying tax violations among wealthy citizens: “There is a task – to identify arrears and replenish the budget. And who will be (among those being checked) – a blogger, or a singer, or someone else, does not really matter. The Forbes interlocutor does not know about the special initiative for field tax audits of bloggers.
What are the checks
Blogger Valery Chekalina was accused of splitting the business, that is, using several individual entrepreneurs for the same activity, which, if the income limit rules were met, could use preferential tax regimes. According to investigators, being an individual entrepreneur, Chekalina used a simplified taxation system (under which a businessman pays either 6% of income or 15% of the difference between income and expenses). But the blogger’s income from the sale of fitness services turned out to be significantly more than the limit, the ICR said in a statement. According to SPARK, in 2021, the revenue of the main legal entity of the Chekalins, Bee Fit LLC, amounted to 2.9 billion rubles, profit – 658 million rubles. The spouses had several more legal entities and individual entrepreneurs.
According to investigators, not wanting to switch to the general taxation system, the blogger decided to register her earnings for her spouse and other relatives. Chekalin spokeswoman Yulia Gromova relayed their refusal to comment to Forbes, citing a signed non-disclosure document.
According to Maria Kukla, business splitting is one of the most common tax avoidance schemes. It is used in many areas of business, it is “well known to the tax authorities,” says the lawyer. In her opinion, the Federal Tax Service drew attention to the influencer marketing market due to the high incomes of its participants. “There have already been several waves of attention to certain industries: cleaning, restaurants, scrap metal collection points. So they got to bloggers as an industry, ”Kukla sums up.
Rustem Bogdanov, the founder of the PC production center, calls tax evasion “the scourge of modern bloggers.” “They didn’t take taxes into account. Lerchek (Valery Chekalina. – Forbes) at least evaded through the IP of relatives, and many others accepted cash or by transfer to the card of an individual, says Bogdanov. “When we faced the recruitment of resident bloggers in the HRC in 2019, almost everyone had to open an individual entrepreneur or apply for self-employment later, because before they didn’t even think about taxes from their activities.”
He is echoed by the founder of the WhoIsBlogger service Lev Grunin: “At the background of the rapid growth of business and income, the legal and financial elements of bloggers often did not reach the general level.” According to Bogdanov, the market began to put itself in order in 2021 – gradually bloggers, especially large ones, began to process receipts for commercial activities “as they should.” Maxim Petrenchuk, the founder of the Social Stars advertising agency, says the same thing: “As they grew, bloggers began to cooperate with agencies, they got managers who put the accounting in order.”
Over the past few years, the influencer marketing market has become “much whiter,” says Tatyana Ivanova, President of the Association of Bloggers and Agencies (ABA): “The number of self-employed people is growing, and production agencies have become more active and influential in the market.” According to her, it is more profitable for bloggers to “be white”, as agencies are ready to work only with those who legally conduct their activities.
The information business stands apart in this market: some bloggers earn more on their courses, marathons, and so on, than on advertising integrations, Ivanova notes. According to her, such information businessmen, unlike large bloggers, as a rule, conduct business on their own, without involving accountants and lawyers. “It looks like a frivolous approach to doing business, given the amount of income,” says Ivanova. “Therefore, checking in terms of the information business is unpleasant, but quite logical.”
ABA lawyer Anastasia Krasnikova claims that the attention of the tax authorities to the markets of influencer marketing and information business has been growing since 2018, when the Federal Tax Service of Russia and Rosfinmonitoring agreed on the prompt exchange of information on combating the legalization of proceeds from crime and the financing of terrorism. After that, Rosfinmonitoring began to transfer all data on suspicious transactions on bank accounts to the tax service, says Krasnikova: “These were the first steps to remove business, including online, from the gray zone.”
The tax authorities have initiated checks of bloggers and information businessmen until 2022, agrees Rustem Bogdanov. However, according to him, earlier such checks were carried out “if someone crossed the road.” Now, “more carpet bombing,” says Bogdanov. In his opinion, checks will begin with large ones, but in the future they will affect many bloggers: “Now the entire sphere of Russian influencers is being dug up.” At the same time, he considers the main goal of inspections not as such to identify tax violations, but pressure to control future placements of influencers and completely whitewash this market.
Grunin calls bloggers and infobusinessmen in general “a convenient target” for such checks. “Against the background of the general economic and political situation, bloggers are a good segment where there will definitely be accounting problems, and no one will express compassion for them,” he argues. “Here, according to the “Pareto principle”, you can get 80% of the monetary result not even from 20%, but from 0.2% of the biggest bloggers, while intimidating hundreds of thousands of others who still often take cash even without the status of self-employed.”