The practice of checking a counterparty for good faith: how to avoid tax claims. Check yourself and your counterparty: online service

To schedule on-site audits, tax officials use criteria for assessing the tax risk of an enterprise, indicators of the taxpayer’s profitability and the tax burden on his business. This information is not only open - tax authorities even recommend that taxpayers use it for self-checking. The Federal Tax Service has updated the values ​​for assessing the tax burden and profitability for 2017. Tables with numerical parameters of tax risks were published on the Federal Tax Service website.

Check the financial condition of your organization and its counterparties

Check YOURSELF Which financial indicators will definitely attract the attention of inspectors

There is a document with which a taxpayer can analyze how suspicious his reporting will seem to the tax authorities. This is a kind of chipboard manual, only declassified. The document is called “Publicly available criteria for self-assessment of taxpayer risks used by tax authorities in the process of selecting objects for conducting on-site tax audits.”

In addition, there is another document - order of the Federal Tax Service of Russia dated October 14, 2008 No. MM-3-2/467@. The criteria are discussed in more detail below.

The level of tax burden deviates from the average value

This means that the tax burden (the amount of taxes paid divided by revenue) is below the average level for the industry in which it operates.

The company has been making losses for several years in a row.

We are talking about losses over two years or more. In order to avoid excessive attention from inspectors, unprofitable organizations can choose one of two paths. Or transfer part of the expenses to the future and show a profit, albeit small, in the reporting. Or explain to the inspectors the reasons for the loss.

Significant VAT deductions

This means that the share of VAT deductions in the amount of accrued tax for the previous 12 months exceeds 89 percent. The same complaints can be made about this criterion as to the tax burden standard.

Expenses are growing faster than income

Inspectors compare how quickly a company's expenses are growing relative to its revenue. Moreover, accounting and tax accounting data are compared separately. And then they are compared. If the growth rates of accounting and tax expenses do not coincide, then the company may be among the candidates for audit.

Salary below industry average

Low wages are one of the favorite topics of tax authority commissions. Inspectors take the organization's wage fund and divide it by the number of employees. The resulting value is compared with the average salary in the industry. Those companies at risk are those whose prices are lower.

The taxpayer could more than once lose the right to a special regime

In order to apply the simplified system, pay UTII or agricultural tax, an organization or entrepreneur must not exceed the limits defined in the relevant chapters of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation. Let's say, for a “simplified” person, the residual value of fixed assets and intangible assets in accounting should not exceed 100,000,000 rubles.

So, a taxpayer working under a special regime is suspicious if one or another indicator approaches the maximum standard by less than 5 percent twice a year or more often.

An entrepreneur's expenses are approaching his income

This criterion is only for entrepreneurs. According to the Federal Tax Service of Russia, those whose share of professional deductions in their total income exceeds 83 percent are suspicious.

The company works with resellers and intermediaries

Despite the fact that the title of the eighth criterion refers only to working with resellers and intermediaries, in fact it concerns all those suspected of unjustified tax benefits. In other words, this criterion is met by all those companies that exhibit one or another of the signs listed in the Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Arbitration Court of the Russian Federation dated October 12, 2006 No. 53.

The taxpayer does not provide explanations to the inspectors

If you know the TIN of the counterparty, tax.ru - the official website of the Federal Tax Service of Russia - allows you to learn quite a lot about the legal entity, merchant or ordinary individual with whom you intend to cooperate. We will tell you what and how you can learn from this portal below.

Mandatory stage

The ability to check a counterparty using the Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) on tax.ru has become firmly established in business practice. Moreover, on the one hand, this is your right, but on the other hand, it is also your duty to exercise the necessary caution when choosing business partners.

If you check a counterparty using the Tax.ru Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN), you can be sure that you are receiving reliable information from official sources. In particular, they make it possible to:

• draw conclusions about the solvency of the counterparty, including mandatory payments to the treasury;
• can it be classified as ephemeral;
• find out the legal address and full name. the head of the organization of interest.

Meanwhile, in practice, checking a counterparty using the TIN on tax.ru does not always provide a sufficient amount of information to confidently draw a conclusion about the degree of reliability of the counterparty.

Main online service

First of all, in order to check the counterparty by TIN at tax.ru, go to the following link:

https://egrul.nalog.ru/

To find out the counterparty by TIN on tax.ru, you need to take the following steps, which are described in the table.

It looks like this:

It should be noted that the Federal Tax Service of Russia updates information from this service every day. Using tax.ru, searching for a counterparty by TIN allows you to be aware of:

• name of the organization, its legal address;
• OGRN, INN, KPP;
• dates of state registration;
• termination of activity (with date);
• invalidation of registration (with date).

In addition, from this service you can download and print an extract from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities with more expanded information about the counterparty you are interested in. In particular:

• on the amount of authorized capital;
• founders/participants;
• persons who can act on behalf of the organization without a power of attorney;
• types of activities according to OKVED, etc.

A complete list of data about organizations and individual entrepreneurs that the Federal Tax Service puts into its open databases is given in Order of the Ministry of Finance of Russia dated December 5, 2013 No. 115n.

Corporate history

On the tax.ru website, checking a counterparty by TIN for free also means finding out its corporate history. The publication of the Russian Tax Service “Bulletin of State Registration” helps in this. You can find it at the following link:

http://www.vestnik-gosreg.ru/publ/vgr/

Here you can find various communications from companies that they are required by law to post publicly. First of all, these are the facts of decision making:

• about closure;
• reorganization;
• reduction of authorized capital;
• purchase of LLC 20% of the authorized capital of another company, etc.

Threat of exclusion from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities

In relation to inactive organizations that do not exhibit any business activity, the Federal Tax Service may decide on future exclusion from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities. Such data is also reflected in the publication “Bulletin of State Registration”. But the link to them is slightly different:

http://www.vestnik-gosreg.ru/publ/fz83/

When there is no connection with a legal entity

The Federal Tax Service daily updates the database containing companies that cannot be contacted at the legal address they declared during state registration. In this regard, you can check the counterparty by TIN on the tax.ru website here:

https://service.nalog.ru/baddr.do

Tax debts of the counterparty

To find out the tax debt of a counterparty using the TIN, you must use the following link:

https://service.nalog.ru/zd.do

This service makes it possible to obtain information about a company if it:

• does not submit tax reports for more than 1 year;
• as of April 1, 2017, her tax debt to the budget exceeded 1,000 rubles and a procedure for its forced collection was initiated.

This is a completely new service on the website of the Federal Tax Service of Russia, so for now it is working in test mode. Tax officials promise to update it once a month.

Managing organizations, homeowners' associations and housing cooperatives, like any other organizations, when conducting their main activities, may encounter dishonesty of counterparties(suppliers, contractors, performers, customers) with whom they enter into contractual relations. Risks can be reduced in different ways: by providing for interim measures (penalties, bank guarantees, surety agreements), concluding contracts on risk-reducing terms, and stipulating large penalties in contracts. But all this may turn out to be ineffective in case of concluding an agreement with an unscrupulous person (for example, with a shell company; a company in the process of liquidation, etc.). In order to protect yourself from these risks before making a transaction, you need check the counterparty by TIN.

The Federal Tax Service has developed a special one for these purposes: check yourself and your counterparty . Verification involves determining the correctness of documents, identifying types of activities and features of registration. Such a check can be carried out by any individual or legal entity. Such checks will protect people from low-quality goods and services. Checking the counterparty by TIN helps to increase confidence in the reliability of the business partner.

How to check a counterparty by TIN on the website of the Federal Tax Service of the Russian Federation

The page will open " Search criteria" For example, you can select “Legal entity. Next, select a search by OGRN/TIN or by the name of the legal entity. In line " Search by:» you need to select known data - either OGRN / INN, or the name of the organization and the region of location.

Federal Tax Service of the Russian Federation. Check yourself and your counterparty by TIN.

You can select the “Individual entrepreneur/peasant farm” tab. Then we next select a search by OGRNIP/TIN or full name and region of residence. When selecting “Full name and region of residence”, you must select the region of residence from the list and manually fill in the following fields: Last name, First name, Patronymic. When selecting “OGRN/IP”, you must enter either a 15-digit or 12-digit digital code, respectively.

By entering the correct information and numbers from the picture , you will see information about the registration date, INN, OGRN, location, date of entry on the termination of the counterparty’s activities, and will also have the opportunity to view an extract from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities or Unified State Register of Individual Entrepreneurs.

Thus, you will be able to analyze the timing of the counterparty’s activities, types of activities, information about the head of the legal entity, the availability of necessary licenses and get an idea of ​​​​his experience and the availability of rights to carry out activities.

Checking an extract from the Unified State Register of Individual Entrepreneurs

USRIP— a unified state register in which the discrepancies between the concepts of “private entrepreneur” and “individual entrepreneur” are eliminated. This system reflects information on all entrepreneurs in the Russian Federation.

To obtain an extract from the Unified State Register of Individual Entrepreneurs, you need to contact the tax service - either at the local branch or on the official website of the Federal Tax Service. The document is issued in two forms - written or electronic. The paper form is sent to the post office.

An extract from the Unified State Register of Individual Entrepreneurs reflects all data related to the functioning of an individual entrepreneur: registration, types of activities, tax registration. This document is important when performing any legally significant process, so it is necessary to verify the counterparty.

Checking the counterparty by TIN without Internet access

TIN stands for individual taxpayer number. This document is issued to each individual upon reaching the age of 14 when writing an application to the tax office. An individual entrepreneur registers a TIN only if he has not previously received a document as an individual.

Taxpayer number for legal entities has ten digits . For example, by the first four digits you can determine the code of the “fiscal” unit where the organization was issued a tax registration certificate. Combination of numbers starting with fifth and ending ninth, means the serial number of the registration record about the taxpayer. The last, tenth digit is control numeric value , which is selected based on a special algorithm. Taxpayer number for citizens and individual entrepreneurs comprises twelve digits .

Let's consider the entrepreneur's TIN. So, in it 12 digits(Arabic). The first two digits indicate the number of the region where the document was issued, for example, 50 for the Moscow region and 77 for the city of Moscow. Next, two digits reflect the code of the local branch of the Federal Tax Service. The next six digits are the serial number of the entrepreneur's tax record. The last two digits of the number are called control numeric values.

Check digits in the TIN are necessary to verify the correctness of the number. Using the data, you can independently check the correctness of the individual taxpayer number for any individual entrepreneur. However, to check a counterparty using the TIN, you need to know the verification algorithm itself. For example, let’s take the TIN of an individual entrepreneur.

Algorithm for checking the TIN of an entrepreneur

The calculation is made using the following algorithm. All TIN digits are indicated by n with a serial number. Check numbers are indicated n11 And n12. Each digit of the first ten is assigned a coefficient m :

To verify the check digit n11 it is necessary to multiply each digit of the TIN ( n) by the corresponding coefficient ( m). Add the resulting numbers and divide by 11 , thus obtaining a non-integer number. Select the whole part from it, multiply by 11 and subtract the resulting result from the product of the first ten digits and coefficients.

In practice, most entrepreneurs, especially beginners, have many questions regarding the process of searching and checking counterparties: what tools should be used, are there free opportunities for this, what information needs to be analyzed, etc. Moreover, there are no standard rules and criteria for such verification . All actions that need to be taken are usually developed by companies themselves during the analysis process, based on a risk assessment.

According to Andrey Khrykin, project manager at Focus.Forum, the process of verifying counterparties rests on three pillars:

• Trustworthiness - the company's intentions and its relationship with the government and other business partners;
• assessment - identifying the main assessment criteria and objective information;
• knowledge - understanding what information is worth considering and what is not.

Why search and check counterparties?

Verifying a counterparty is a comprehensive and not one-time job, as many may think. But it is necessary, because the company’s money and reputation are at stake. It is not for nothing that the tax authorities warn that responsibility for choosing a counterparty lies entirely with the company. Therefore, it should be interested in assessing the risks and tax consequences that may arise as a result of cooperation with dubious counterparties. If the tax office has claims against one of your counterparties, it is likely that you will unwittingly find yourself in trouble.

Verification of new counterparties is also necessary taking into account such a concept as “unjustified tax benefit”, which is supposed to be received by those entrepreneurs who minimize taxation by evading taxes.

Why the service is convenient:

• The search for a company or individual entrepreneur is carried out by name, address, full name, tax identification number and other parameters. The relevance and reliability of information is guaranteed through access to official government open sources.
• In addition to the latest extracts from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities and the Unified State Register of Individual Entrepreneurs, the user receives data from the Card Index of the Supreme Arbitration Court, the Federal Bailiff Service, the Federal Treasury State Contract Database, the Unified Federal Register of Bankruptcy Information, and the Rosstat Organizations Accounting Database.
• The company card, in addition to all other necessary information, includes a selection of links with mentions of the company on the Internet, which allows you to speed up the process of collecting facts by aggregating information from the media, from forums with reviews, from the website of the company itself and the websites of its partners, suppliers and clients, from the issuer's information disclosure page, from news resources.
• The service user can put 1000 companies under surveillance. Upon learning of changes in data, Contour.Focus will notify the user about them by email.
• The service is able to analyze organizations according to criteria preset by the user.

Offline verification of the counterparty, identification of suspicious signs

Armed with all sorts of free online verification tools, don't forget about offline investigation.

What needs to be done?

• Make sure that the company is actually located at the address indicated in the documents.

This is especially necessary to do in cases where you are negotiating, for example, with a manufacturing company whose activities require the presence of warehouses and premises for production. Unscrupulous counterparties may indicate non-existent addresses.

• Get to know the company's management personally when discussing terms of cooperation and concluding transactions.
• Make sure that the company intends to comply with the terms of the transaction.

This can only be understood during negotiations, observing the behavior of management. You should be wary if the counterparty is in a hurry to conclude a deal and wants to quickly agree on payment, while luring in with low prices and unrealistic conditions.

• Make sure that the conditions specified in the contract are feasible for the counterparty.

Does the counterparty have real capabilities to fulfill the terms of the contract? Will he be able to meet production or delivery deadlines for the product? Will it violate deadlines when completing work?

All companies and individual entrepreneurs, both newly registered on the market and those that have been operating for a long time, prefer to do business with reliable counterparties. But the emergence of new partners, especially in large transactions, can cause certain risks. Therefore, you need to know how to check a counterparty on the tax website using the TIN or using other services. Check yourself and your counterparty using the services.

It is quite important not only to check the counterparty on the tax office’s website using the TIN, but also to check yourself, because this will be a very useful action for company owners.

On the other hand, you will be able to find out how your partners see you. After all, not only will you be checking your future partner, but you will also be checked for trustworthiness.

So, for example, you can additionally find out:

• Whether or not you have tax debt. If there is one, then it is advisable to pay off your debts as quickly as possible, otherwise your current account may be blocked.
• To ensure control over the work of the accounting department in terms of the completeness and quality of the reporting provided to the tax authorities.

Why should you check the reliability of your counterparty before concluding a contract?

It is best to enter into long-term contracts with reliable clients, especially for large transactions. When concluding a new contract, it is advisable to check who you will be dealing with. And this needs to be done by both new and experienced companies.

But even in a permanent partner we cannot always be sure. Therefore, you can check the counterparty on the tax website using the TIN or on another service to prevent a serious mistake.

Here is just some information that checking the counterparty by TIN can provide:

• The manager is not trustworthy. This is the first call you may receive. Such a person can also be a fictitious person and be registered in several companies at once. So, for example, it’s worth thinking about if you are holding a tender and several companies with one director are applying for it at once.
• The company is in the process of liquidation, bankruptcy or reorganization. This can happen if the counterparty decides to withhold this information. By starting a business with such a company, you may not get your money, but end up in a queue of debtors.
• The partner company does not have a permit or license for the type of activity they carry out. It will also be extremely important to know this so as not to set yourself up.
• A ban on conducting a certain type of activity.
• The timing of activities is different than announced. Companies may advertise that they have been in business for longer than they actually have in order to appear more reputable. This is already the first signal that you shouldn’t deal with such people.
• The legal address of the company is massive. This is not a fundamental criterion, which does not mean that it is better not to do business with such a counterparty, but it is worth being wary and conducting a more detailed check.
• The company details do not match the data provided. This fact can arise either from the banal carelessness of the person who prepared the documents, but also as a result of deliberate deception. Incorrect details can result in problems for you, for example, when filing an alcohol return or a VAT return.
• The company does everything and has everything. This happens with fly-by-night companies and with companies that engage in financial fraud and deception.

Collecting information is only part of the story; the next step will be live communication in the partner’s office. In this case, you should pay attention to the company sign and how long it has been at this address. As a rule, fly-by-night companies simply do not have a sign. Even the presence of a website does not always mean that a partner is reliable.

Attention! In order to carry out a quick check, you can use the services of an online service - it is not free, but a big advantage will be the general collection of data and ready-made output. What you will do manually during the day - you can do in 5 minutes - check yourself and your counterparty.

What should be requested from the counterparty to verify it?

If you decide to check a counterparty, you should request the following documents from him:

• A copy of the company registration certificate (OGRN).
• A copy of the organization's tax registration certificate (TIN).
• A copy of the organization's charter. But in practice it is not always provided.
• A copy of the director's passport.
• Accounting statements for the previous year in order to assess financial reliability.

How to check a counterparty on the tax website using TIN - instructions

Step 1. Go to the tax office website and enter data for verification

In order to analyze the reliability and information provided about the client, you need to check yourself and the counterparty.

The first step is to enter the TIN details of the company you want to check or its OGRN. Then enter the captcha - the symbols from the picture in the appropriate field and click check. If you entered the data correctly, the system will display the result.

Step 2. Checking the organization

Attention! In some cases, you may be issued by several organizations that are registered under the same TIN or with the same name.

If you have issued several organizations with the same name, it’s not a big deal, it’s possible. It is necessary to select the desired organization, in accordance with the TIN, OGRN or address. If there are several organizations with the same TIN, then this is very strange and leads to certain thoughts.

Step 3. We receive an extract from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities and analyze it

The next step is to receive an extract and the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, in it you can see all the information about the company and compare it with the documents provided. In this example, we can see that the company is in bankruptcy. This can be seen from paragraph 41 of the extract, where the title of the title is “Competition Manager”.

Unfortunately, we cannot always see such information if we want to check the counterparty on the tax website using the TIN. For a deeper check and analysis of the information received, it is better to use the Internet service.

Attention! Download an example of a statement in PDF format, in which we have highlighted the items that are worth paying attention to.

Checking a company using the Unified Bankruptcy Register

Checking a company on the tax website may not reveal anything, so it is worth additionally finding information about it on the website of the Unified Register of Bankruptcy Companies. Our example reflects this very well. The Olymp company has been in bankruptcy for a long time and this fact may not be visible when checking it on the tax website.

To find a company you need to do the following:

• Opens the official website listed in the link above.
• On the left we see “Search for debtors”. We need to click on the link below - “Advanced Debtor Search”.
• In the “Code” field, indicate the INN, OGRN or OKPO of the company you are checking.
• Click search and wait for the results.

As can be seen from this example, we have found an organization in the database. And at the same time it is in the process of bankruptcy.

Important! This check should be carried out in parallel with the check on the Tax Ru website.

Useful links for checking a counterparty

Checking the counterparty on the tax website using the TIN is only half the battle; in addition, you will need the following services: