Shokhin vs. the Tax Service: A New Ombudsman's Ambitions, or Business Already Cornered?

Alexander Shokhin has, for the first time in a long while, openly broken with the course toward tighter tax administration - and he did so not as an ordinary lobbyist, but as someone who clearly senses that his institutional weight allows him to speak louder than usual.

The Numbers Behind the Nervousness

The formal pretext for the criticism is the problem of simultaneously applying several preferential investment regimes, which has driven fines at some companies up to levels comparable to their annual revenue. In the first quarter of 2026, the Federal Tax Service (FNS) collected 9.4 billion rubles from businesses - eight times more than the same period last year - while the number of on-site inspections tripled. This dynamic does not fit the narrative of "targeted" administration; it is a systemic tightening of the screws that coincided with Shokhin's appointment as business ombudsman at the end of May 2026.

Tellingly, just weeks before that, Shokhin himself had publicly praised the FNS and its head, Daniil Yegorov, personally, for effectively combating business fragmentation schemes, while urging that the VAT exemption threshold of 20 million rubles not be lowered. In other words, as recently as early June, the rhetoric was conciliatory - "let's build a friendly attitude toward entrepreneurs." A short time later, that same topic turned into direct, targeted criticism of the agency. Such a sharp shift in tone within a matter of weeks is either a reaction to alarming new fine statistics, or a calculated show of strength by someone who has just taken a new post and clearly intends to use it.

An Institution With Sharper Teeth

The context of the appointment itself matters here. The position of business ombudsman had been vacant since June 22, 2022 - nearly four years during which the state went without a formal defender of entrepreneurs. Shokhin did not arrive empty-handed: he himself proposed reforming the institute, replacing the state apparatus with an autonomous non-profit organization funded directly through the Presidential Property Management Directorate rather than through the Civic Chamber. Putin backed these proposals. The result is a rare case of a candidate rewriting the rules of the game for his own future post - which in itself speaks to the level of trust he was granted in advance.

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Shokhin vs. the Tax Service: A New Ombudsman's Ambitions, or Business Already Cornered?

A Second Salvo in a Row - No Longer a Coincidence

The attack on the FNS is not an isolated outburst but the second public grievance in a short span: earlier, Shokhin was equally direct in criticizing industrial policy, touching on the interests of Industry and Trade Minister Anton Alikhanov. Two targeted strikes against two different federal agencies in quick succession is no longer a spontaneous emotional reaction but a deliberate strategy of probing the boundaries of his own influence. In the past, this kind of rhetoric from the head of the RSPP (Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs) sounded softer and more evasive; now Shokhin is clearly testing how far he can go without turning criticism into an open war between elite factions.

Ambition, or the Desperation of Business?

Here lies the central question: are we looking at Shokhin consolidating his own institutional standing, or a cry of desperation from businesses that genuinely have nothing left to pay fines comparable to their annual revenue? Most likely, both are true at once - and that is the most unpleasant combination possible for the Mishustin-Yegorov camp. An eightfold rise in collections and a threefold rise in inspections within a single quarter is not abstract statistics for a report; it represents real companies teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because of a conflict between several preferential regimes that the state itself designed and then failed to reconcile with one another.

In this situation, Shokhin finds himself in a comfortable position: he is not criticizing an abstract "state fiscal policy" but a specific instance of legal enforcement gone wrong that is genuinely strangling businesses - and against that backdrop, he looks like a defender rather than a disruptor of the system. But as long as this remains rhetoric with no visible consequences for the FNS's course, the words of the RSPP's head function more as a demonstration of growing influence than as an actual brake on the tax machine. The real test of the new ombudsman's weight will not come when he delivers another sharp statement, but when a specific FNS decision regarding a specific company is reversed precisely because of his intervention. Until that moment, this remains a game of ambition playing out against a backdrop of businesses squeezed between several tiers of power that clearly have not agreed among themselves on the rules.