Main points
- Going abroad does not exempt an individual entrepreneur from a potential tax audit after closing.
- A tax audit may be scheduled when registering the termination of business activities or submitting an application for deregistration of a taxpayer.
Will the tax office check an individual entrepreneur who has left the country? / Photo Unsplash
Currently, many Ukrainians can close their individual entrepreneurs. They can also submit all necessary reports and travel abroad.
Can a sole proprietorship close down and go abroad?
However, this will not help avoid an audit from the State Tax Service, as stated on the 7eminar website.
Traveling abroad is not a reason to avoid an inspection in connection with the liquidation of an individual entrepreneur,
– emphasized in the material.
The fact is that the Tax Code of Ukraine and other regulatory legal acts do not provide for such a possibility. A tax audit may be ordered in the following cases:
- registration of termination of business activity;
- or submitting an application for deregistration of a taxpayer.
The decision to conduct an inspection is made by the head of the tax authority (or an authorized person) based on circumstances that may indicate a violation of the law or tax obligations. However, the State Tax Service authorities do not always order inspections.
The question of whether or not an audit is appropriate is decided by a specially created commission within the tax authority, which analyzes the available data. For example, if it is known that an individual entrepreneur's tax liabilities have been understated or overstated or that there has been a violation of legal requirements, then an audit should be expected.
Therefore, traveling abroad does not exempt you from a potential audit. The tax service independently decides whether there are grounds for conducting an audit in connection with the closure of an individual entrepreneur,
– noted in the text.
Important! Over 250 thousand individual entrepreneurs closed in Ukraine in 11 months of 2025. This is evidenced by data from Opendatabot. On average, individual entrepreneurs “exist” for 2.4 years. A third of the closures are entrepreneurs working in retail trade.
What else should you know about closing a sole proprietorship and tax audits?
To close an individual entrepreneur in 2026, you must go through many important stages. In particular, dismiss employees, check for debt, cancel existing licenses, and submit an application to the state registrar to terminate the individual entrepreneur.
In 2026, the Tax Service planned to conduct 4,558 inspections. The majority of inspections of individual entrepreneurs in 2026 are expected to be on entrepreneurs with income up to 20 million hryvnias (this is about 670 people). The leader in the list of inspections will be the city of Kyiv.