Drone manufacturers and volunteers call for everybody's attention— the "parcel tax" proposed by the Ministry of Finance will stop Ukrainian arms production, slow down supplies for the Armed Forces, and make it more expensive to provide the military with the necessary equipment.
This is written by Censor, which analyzes the consequences of the government's initiative to impose value-added tax, and possibly import duties, on all parcels from abroad.
"The cancellation of tax benefits for the import of parcels and delays in their delivery will hurt small Ukrainian drone manufacturers and developers of innovative solutions for the Armed Forces," Censor warns.
"For small manufacturers of drones and the military, who assemble drones in the unit with volunteer funds, this is just some kind of punishment... The assembly is already going so hard, and now everything will take even longer because it will be necessary to collect more," volunteer Karina Tumaieva comments on 'tax on parcels.'
The tax innovation will kill or greatly complicate the assembly of large batches of drones for the military by Ukrainians who joined the "People's Drone" project, which was personally popularized by the Deputy Prime Minister for Innovation / Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov.
Co-founder of the Dignitas charity fund, Lyuba Shypovych, reminded that Ukrainian-made FPV drones consist of Chinese components for 80%-100%, and those components are delivered by parcels to small manufacturers from Chinese marketplaces.
Therefore, their taxation will lead to an increase in the price of components, and inspection of parcels upon import to Ukraine to determine their value for taxation will significantly slow down the supply of critical components. It will become even more difficult for volunteers and producers to raise money because the introduction of taxes and duties will require raising even larger amounts.
'Tax on parcels' will hit even the development of new weapons samples of Ukroboronprom. As the development engineer of one of the enterprises of the state defense concern told Censor, to assemble experimental samples of weapons and prototypes, they buy inexpensive spare parts with mail delivery - this allows them to be received promptly without excessive bureaucracy for development and experiments before introduction into serial production.
"This initiative will hit our projects for the development of new drones the most - we order dozens of small batches of parts through parcels from the EU and China. The production of new products will slow down because we will have to spend more working capital," a representative of the volunteer team for the production of FPV kamikaze drones Wild Hornets, which handed over 14,000 FPV drones made by volunteers and the military themselves to the front and are actively developing new models, told Censor.
"The negative consequences of this initiative will several times exceed the effect of additional revenues to the budget," adds the representative of Wild Hornets.
Deputy Yaroslav Zhelezniak warns that taxing almost all parcels from abroad will cause a collapse at customs, and parcels will be delayed for months. In addition, lawmakers doubt the effectiveness of the tax: the government plans to collect about 3.3 billion. However, more will have to be spent on administration.
"Some experts point out that the "parcel tax" is being lobbied by the so-called official importers who monopolize high prices. This is a purely lobbyist story, and it is very ugly," said Volodymyr Dubrovskyi, senior economist at CASE Ukraine.
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