// wiki · note · September 2026

Paying for foreign AI services: VAT and expenses

Draft article. The rules are as of September 2026; they are verified against the current edition of the Tax Code before publication.

The short answer

A subscription to a foreign AI service is an import of an electronic service. If the seller is not registered with the Russian FNS, the buyer becomes a VAT tax agent: it calculates the tax itself at the estimation rate, pays it to the budget and reports. From 2026 the estimation rate has risen to 22/122. A separate layer is confirming the expense for profit tax, when the service does not work with a Russian company directly and payment goes through a chain of intermediaries.

Agency VAT: when the company pays for the service

The rules for services in electronic form are set by Article 174.2 of the Tax Code. Two scenarios:

• The foreign seller is registered with the FNS — it calculates and pays Russian VAT itself. The buyer withholds nothing; ideally the tax amount is visible in the documents.
• The seller is not registered — from 1 October 2022 the obligation passes to the Russian buyer (an organisation or an individual entrepreneur): it withholds VAT from the payment and transfers it to the budget as a tax agent.

What the agent does by quarter-end: calculates the tax at the estimation rate (from 2026 — 22/122 of the amount paid), issues an invoice “to itself” within five days, pays the tax in equal shares within the unified tax payment and reflects the operations in the return. The agency VAT paid is deductible when the service is used in taxable activity (para. 2.1 of Article 171 of the Tax Code) — so for a VAT payer it is often a cash gap rather than a final cost; for a company on the simplified regime without VAT it is a non-refundable surcharge to the subscription price.

The 22/122 rate means: if the service sends an invoice for 100 conventional units, the tax “sits inside” that amount rather than being charged on top.The meaning of the estimation rate — note to Article 164 of the Tax Code

Intermediaries and gifts from the bank

Many foreign services do not accept payment directly from Russia, and companies pay through intermediaries — residents reselling access. Three questions arise here that need answers before an inspection:

• who is the contractor under the documents: if the invoice names a Russian intermediary, agency VAT disappears, but an assessment of its role appears (resale of access vs technical assistance) and a reclassification risk;
• currency control: payments to a non-resident require an operation code and documents confirming the purpose of the payment; one-off “gift” schemes do not help here;
• the sanctions clause: the services' own terms often prohibit access from unsupported jurisdictions — breaching the user agreement strikes both the deduction and the expense — see below.

Profit-tax expenses: what confirms them

An AI service subscription is an ordinary expense if two conditions of Article 252 of the Tax Code are met: it is connected with income-generating activity and documented. In practice, for AI subscriptions this means:

• economic justification: an internal document linking the service to work processes (the AI policy from the note “AI and trade secrets” covers both data protection and expense justification);
• documents: the service's invoice or receipt, a breakdown of charges, confirmation of the corporate-card debit; when paying through an intermediary — its invoice and an act specifying which access was provided;
• exchange differences on currency payments — standard accounting, often forgotten at year-end closing.

The contested zone is services that do not officially work with Russia: the tax authority may question both the justification of the expense and the validity of the deduction, since using the service breaches its own terms. The conservative solution is to prefer services officially available to Russian companies, or Russian models: for them the VAT story is simpler and expense coefficients apply.

Checklist

• determine for each service whether the seller is registered with the FNS (the register on the FNS website);
• set up withholding and payment of agency VAT at the 22/122 estimation rate, invoices and the return;
• check that payments go under the correct currency-control codes with a full set of documents;
• fix the purpose of each service in the AI policy — this is both data protection and expense justification;
• check the possibility of deducting agency VAT (general regime) or the cost of the question under the simplified regime.

Setting up subscription accounting and an AI policy for a specific business is helped by ongoing legal support.