Kazakh Tax Authorities Uncover 72 Billion Tenge in Underreported Blogger Income

Tax authorities in Kazakhstan have identified significant underreporting of income by hundreds of bloggers, with the total amount reaching 72 billion tenge. Vice Minister of Finance Yerzhan Birzhanov announced that investigations into some influencers are ongoing.

Since the start of the audits, tax officials have sent 1,586 notifications to 854 bloggers concerning the underreported income. To date, 622 of these bloggers have filed amended tax declarations. They have increased their declared income by 18.3 billion tenge and paid an additional nearly 1 billion tenge in taxes. They were also instructed to pay approximately another 600 million tenge.

Birzhanov stated that checks are currently being conducted on seven more bloggers, where the amount of additionally assessed taxes exceeds 10 million tenge each. "Investigative measures are underway now," he said at a government briefing. "If, after these measures, the amounts are not paid voluntarily and are significant, we will recover them by transferring materials to law enforcement agencies, or procedural decisions will be made." The vice minister did not disclose the bloggers' names, citing tax secrecy laws.

This wave of scrutiny follows a similar event in February last year when Kazakh bloggers received mass tax notifications about debts totaling billions of tenge. At that time, according to data from the State Revenue Committee, 594 individuals had understated their income by 53.3 billion tenge.

Blogger Alisher Yelikbayev reported on his page that some colleagues faced additional tax assessments exceeding 300 million tenge. This suggests their presumed turnover could be around one billion tenge.

The notifications were reportedly sent to bloggers with more than 20 thousand subscribers. Many were surprised by the large sums they were asked to pay, which caused a wave of public discontent.