The trigger sits in one clause. Under the draft, a bank would report any personal card or e-wallet that receives, in a calendar month, transfers worth at least 500 times the base calculation amount from senders who are not close relatives. The stated target is people running an unregistered business through a personal card.
The State Tax Committee has spent the past two weeks insisting the measure grants no new powers and does not abolish bank secrecy. It points to Article 134 of the Tax Code and the Law on Bank Secrecy, which already let banks share tax-related information under set procedures, and notes that data reaching tax officials is itself protected as tax secrecy. Officials add that OECD members run similar reporting, and that Uzbekistan signed up to the Global Forum on tax transparency, which obliges it to write clear rules.
The objections are specific and come with names. Economist Otabek Bakirov argues the draft collides with the constitutional guarantee of banking confidentiality, and recalls that earlier attempts to monitor card-to-card transfers were dropped after the last round of constitutional reform. Former lawmaker Rasul Kusherbayev frames it as a confidence problem: if banks start routinely handing account data to tax officials, depositors leave the formal system.
The state is trying to widen a tax base that stays narrow, using the one asset a cashless economy runs on: the depositor’s trust.
The legal core of the complaint is a hierarchy-of-laws point. A government resolution is a subordinate act, and several public commenters, along with human-rights lawyer Ozod Juraboev, say a subordinate act cannot narrow a right the constitution grants, that this needs a law passed by parliament, and in places a court order. Critics also draw a line the current code already draws: automatic notice of technical events such as opening an account is one thing, automatic reporting of balances and transaction flows without a specific request is another.
What makes this a Central Asia Wire story is not the tax argument. It is the driver behind it. The resolution executes a standing instruction: a December 2025 presidential decree on shrinking the informal economy, and a May 2026 presidential roadmap that explicitly told officials to make banks report large incoming transfers to personal cards. Tashkent is trying to widen a formal tax base that stays stubbornly narrow.
The bind is that Uzbekistan has spent years pushing citizens into cashless payments and bank accounts, and that shift runs on trust. A rule that widens the tax net by reading personal transfers spends some of that trust to collect. Whether the state can formalise the shadow economy without pushing money back toward cash and informal channels is the state-capacity question underneath the privacy one.