In September 2026, the Federal Tax Service Administration for Tula Region sent an audit report to Torgservis 71, the company managing regional stores of the Svetofor chain, citing a tax underpayment of 147 million rubles. According to chain representatives, this exact amount has brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy. The report itself, according to the company's lawyers, contains about 396 errors, which they believe stem from machine processing of documents using artificial intelligence without proper human verification.
Core claim: fictitious contract and 'director in the SMO'
The inspectors' central claim concerns a fruit and vegetable supply contract from August 2021, which the tax authority deemed fictitious. The report states that the supplier company's director could not have signed the document because, according to inspectors, he had already volunteered for the 'SMO' in January 2021. However, as Svetofor points out, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine did not begin until a year later, in 2022, making the report's phrasing internally contradictory. An additional discrepancy concerns weight discrepancies: in March 2025, the difference between the ordered and actually received weight of cucumbers was 11 kilograms according to the company, whereas the tax report lists this figure as 689 kilograms.
Deliveries that 'never happened'
A separate block of claims relates to the period from January to March 2026: inspectors concluded that the supplier Alliance-MF did not deliver fruit and vegetables to the chain's stores. According to Svetofor, this conclusion was based on reports where the supplier indicated supply periods instead of exact dates, which the company argues is not equivalent to a lack of deliveries. Combined, these contradictions and arithmetic inaccuracies amount to approximately 396 errors in a single document, according to the lawyers' assessment.
174 pages of objections and inspectors' silence
Torgservis 71 submitted objections to the regional tax office, attaching 174 pages of evidence. Daria Mikhailova, head of the DMPRAVO law firm, stated that the administration reviewed the objections the day after receiving them. According to her, the tax leadership twice refused to answer a direct question on whether they had read the audit report. The outcome of the review of objections has not been specified in public data. Mikhailova links the nature of the errors—in dates and calculations—to machine document processing without substantive human verification.
AI in tax authorities: confirmed, but 'fragmentary' tool
The issue of using artificial intelligence in the Federal Tax Service's work is not hypothetical: in June 2026, agency head Daniil Egorov confirmed that the service uses AI for certain tasks, while emphasizing that its application is 'very disparate, very fragmented' to 'see how it works.' According to Mikhailova, DMPRAVO is handling 30 complaints regarding tax audits across seven regions and suspects AI use in every case. 'Everyone knows that the SMO started in 2022. Only a program that passes off assumptions as facts might not know this. I see machine processing whose results have not undergone full and substantive human verification,' the lawyer stated, adding that the text of the report is voluminous, with confident formulations and references to legislation, but when analyzing a specific delivery, the document's logic, in her assessment, 'falls apart.' At the time of publication, the tax office's position on the substance of the company's claims had not been disclosed in open sources.
