Uzbekistan Launches AI-Powered "Shadow Economy Map" Digital Platform

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.uz) — President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev held a working meeting dedicated to the presentation of a complex of comprehensive measures aimed at limiting the scale of the shadow economy and radically increasing the efficiency of prosecutorial supervision in this area.

Over the past two years, thanks to the introduction of risk analysis systems in fiscal authorities and the elimination of legislative loopholes, the share of the unobserved sector in the country has been reduced from 35 percent to 23 percent, providing an additional 38 trillion soums in budget revenues.

The officially employed population has exceeded 8.5 million people, while the average salary has approached 6.5 million soums. At the same time, the scale of illegal turnover remains high: in the first quarter of the current year, the volume of hidden income amounted to 81.1 trillion soums in agriculture, 24.5 trillion soums in trade and services, 23.9 trillion soums in construction, and 6.7 trillion soums in industry.

To achieve strategic targets by 2030—including halving the shadow sector, increasing the number of legally employed individuals to 14 million, and raising the share of cashless payments to 75 percent—the Prosecutor General's Office has developed and launched the "Shadow Economy Map" analytical platform in a pilot mode.

The system utilizes artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically detect hidden jobs, underreported profits, unlicensed activities, and the concealment of commodity turnover. The information complexes of 16 relevant ministries and agencies have already been integrated into the platform's database, allowing real-time risk monitoring across 22 key industries, 85 sectors, 14 regions, and 208 cities and districts of the republic.

During the creation of the software package, economists, mathematicians, and econometrics specialists introduced more than one hundred individual risk assessment criteria that take into account the specifics of each region and tax regime. Based on these parameters, the system automatically categorizes industries and territories into "green," "yellow," and "red" hazard levels.

The digitalization of analytics is intended to shift prosecutorial supervision onto a targeted basis, completely minimizing the human factor. Controlling bodies will receive precise mandates based on AI-generated data, while systemic problems left unresolved at the district level will be progressively escalated to provincial and republic levels for subsequent regulatory and legal reforms.

The Head of State analyzed the functionality of the new system in detail and emphasized that pervasive digitalization and strict interagency data exchange must serve as the key factors in combating the latent sector.

Responsible officials were instructed to ensure the integration of more than 70 additional state databases into the system by October 1 of this year to achieve 100 percent coverage of all spheres. The full-scale launch of the platform across the entire territory of Uzbekistan is scheduled for the beginning of next year.

In parallel, supervisory authorities have been tasked with strictly suppressing manifestations of unfair competition and multi-folding the personal responsibility of officials for the dynamics of reducing shadow operations within their entrusted areas.