Economy Ministry Sees No Mass Business Closures After Tax Reform
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Most entrepreneurs who closed their individual entrepreneur registrations this year either were not operating or had no income, First Deputy Minister of National Economy Azamat Amrin said, Orda.kz reports.
At a press conference, journalists asked whether the government still considers the tax reform successful, given complaints from small and medium-sized businesses about a growing workload and business closures.
According to Amrin, the number of entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan continues to grow, while claims of mass business closures are not confirmed by the data.
We specifically studied who exactly is closing businesses. In the first four months of 2026, 212,200 small and medium-sized businesses stopped operating. Almost 48% of them had no income at all last year. Another 21% switched from the simplified regime to self-employment. Another 13% had income of one to 10 million tenge, while some entrepreneurs remained founders of other companies. In other words, most of those closing are entities that filed zero reports for years, did not conduct real activity or opened a business for one-time transactions,Amrin said.
He said tax reporting data shows that both the number of receipts issued and total business turnover continue to grow. At the same time, Amrin acknowledged that about 35% of entrepreneurs saw lower revenue than last year, but said this trend existed before the tax reform.
We looked at data not only for this year, but also for 2024, 2023 and 2022. Every year, about 30–35% of entrepreneurs show a decline in revenue compared with the previous period. This is a normal business process. If the situation had sharply worsened after the tax reform and most companies had started losing income, then we could talk about a problem. We do not see that now,Amrin said.
He added that the main indicator of the reform’s effectiveness is not the number of closed individual entrepreneur registrations, but growth in the number of entrepreneurs and tax revenues.
According to Amrin, the number of entrepreneurs has increased by about 120,000 compared with last year, while tax collection has grown by 30%.
Original author: Alina Elgeldina
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