Modern problems of small business taxation and possible solutions

Relevance. Tax policy is a key regulatory instrument for SMEs. The 2024–2025 changes in Russia (parameters of special tax regimes, thresholds and rates) increase the need to assess their effects on the tax and administrative burden of small businesses.
The purpose is to analyze current SME taxation challenges in the Russian Federation and substantiate practical measures that reduce fiscal and transaction costs while preserving incentives for growth.
Objectives: to systematize the 2025 regulatory changes; identify problem areas in the application of USN, PSN, NAP (self-employed regime) and the general regime; assess the impact of regional regulatory heterogeneity; and develop recommendations for digitalization of tax administration and transitional mechanisms between regimes.
Methodology: systematic review of regulatory acts and official explanations of the Federal Tax Service, content analysis of professional publications, and descriptive statistics based on open data; where needed, case studies and expert interviews are proposed for empirical validation.
Results. The 2025 changes produce heterogeneous effects: revised thresholds and simplified parameters improve access to special regimes for some SMEs, while higher burden for entities under the general regime and strict constraints (notably the NAP income cap) increase fiscal and compliance costs. Key problem areas include regime transitions, regional heterogeneity and scaling barriers for the self-employed.
Conclusions. A package of measures is proposed (digitalization of administration, graduated transition mechanisms, indexation of special-regime thresholds, standardization of basic parameters while preserving regional incentives, and targeted incentives for innovative and export-oriented SMEs) to reduce transaction costs and improve regulatory predictability.

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