Published
09/28/2026, 20:08Recently, the State Tax Service has launched a chatbot designed to help taxpayers get answers to their questions more quickly. But can a single bot really perform the work of an entire call center that citizens have traditionally relied on for tax-related assistance?
To this day, accountants remain the primary users of the Tax Service's call center. To gain a professional perspective on the new initiative, Akchabar spoke with Venera Saburova, Director of Buhven, a company specializing in accounting and business support services, and asked for her views on the introduction of the new digital assistant.
Venera Saburova is an experienced accountant and the head of a company that manages accounting services for numerous businesses. Few people are better placed than she is to understand the challenges that both professionals and ordinary taxpayers face every day when trying to comply with their tax obligations and make tax payments.
“As soon as AiSalyk was launched and I saw the little squirrel mascot, I started testing it that very day and asking it questions. I didn’t even realize at first that it operates in two modes, through the State Tax Service website, sti.gov.kg, and through the taxpayer’s personal account. I really liked that and think it’s genuinely impressive. At first, I asked general questions, but then I decided to go deeper and submitted a specific query related to a particular taxpayer’s situation. The response was extremely detailed. AiSalyk cited the relevant article, clause, and subsection of the Tax Code. I immediately took out the Tax Code, checked the references, and confirmed that the answer was accurate. Now, three days later, you could say that I’ve become friends with AiSalyk,” Venera Saburova told Akchabar.
According to Saburova, working with the AI assistant significantly speeds up many of the routine tasks she deals with on a daily basis, which is especially valuable when managing the accounting needs of multiple companies at once.
“In the past, even simple tasks could be time-consuming. For example, when we needed to obtain a certificate confirming that a taxpayer had no outstanding tax liabilities, we had to log into the system, submit a request, wait for a response, and, if the application was rejected, separately find out the reason. Now, AiSalyk can immediately view the taxpayer’s status directly within the personal account and identify whether there is even a small penalty outstanding, such as 10 KGS. It explains that the penalty must first be paid before the certificate can be issued. In other words, there is no longer any need to act blindly and wait for the outcome. You can first ask AiSalyk and immediately understand what is happening and what steps need to be taken next,” — notes Venera Saburova, Director of Buhven.
The question of whether AiSalyk could eventually replace some of the work performed by accountants is one that Venera Saburova has already discussed with her colleagues. In her view, however, it is still too early to see the service as a substitute for a qualified professional.
“At this stage, I would describe AiSalyk as a highly effective assistant for accountants. That said, we cannot completely rule out the possibility that its role will expand in the future. After all, just a few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine that tools like this would even exist,” — she said.
For now, she says, the service may be especially useful for small and medium-sized businesses, which do not always find it practical or cost-effective to employ a dedicated accountant. However, much depends on the company’s turnover, the nature of its activities, and the complexity of its transactions. For businesses that work with major suppliers and deal with a large number of specialized accounting and tax calculations, fully replacing a professional accountant would be far more challenging.
In addition, AiSalyk serves strictly as an advisory tool and cannot replace official tax interpretations. At the end of each interaction, the chatbot itself warns users that they remain responsible for how tax regulations are interpreted and recommends verifying important tax-related information directly with the State Tax Service of the Kyrgyz Republic.
At the same time, she believes that gathering feedback from those who will use the service in practice is especially important at this stage. Entrepreneurs, accountants, and business owners are being asked which features should be added or improved. In her view, the shift toward this format is part of a broader transformation of the Tax Service’s operations.
She recalls that in the early years of her career, after starting work as an accountant in 1994, submitting a single report could take up nearly an entire working day.
“We used to join the queue at eight in the morning and end up spending the entire day at the tax office, sometimes until five or six in the evening. We would sit on windowsills, have lunch there, drink kefir, and eat pastries while waiting,” — she recalls.
After submitting tax reports, taxes still had to be paid separately. Against this backdrop, the ability to receive an answer or check the status of a tax account within minutes no longer seems like just a convenient feature to her, but rather part of the Tax Service’s transition to a service-oriented model.
The idea of creating its own AI-powered tax assistant emerged within the State Tax Service about a year ago. The rapid rise of tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini served as a catalyst, but rather than developing a general-purpose chatbot, the agency chose to apply the technology to a more specific task: providing guidance on Kyrgyzstan’s tax legislation.
“We needed an advisor with deep expertise in our national tax legislation, one that could answer taxpayers’ questions accurately and consistently. We wanted a universal assistant with access to the entire regulatory framework of the Tax Service. Equally important is the fact that it operates within our own infrastructure, with all data stored on our servers,” — Shamshybek Kachkynbay uulu, Director of the Salyk Service under the State Tax Service, told Akchabar.
This was followed by a development and training phase. The team spent about a year training AiSalyk to accurately answer real-world taxpayer inquiries. As a result, AiSalyk now operates through two channels. One version is integrated into the State Tax Service website and provides answers to general questions about tax legislation. The other is embedded in the taxpayer’s personal account and works with the taxpayer’s actual data, enabling it to provide guidance based on their specific tax situation and history.
Since AiSalyk works not only with general inquiries but also with data from taxpayers’ personal accounts, ensuring the protection of personal information and tax confidentiality became a key consideration during its deployment.
“Our AI system is hosted locally. We are not tied to any cloud-based solution, nor do we store data on foreign servers. We have our own infrastructure and computing resources,” — says the director of Salyk Service.
In practice, the system does not require extensive computing power. It does not analyze the entire internet; instead, it works with a defined set of documents and data provided by the State Tax Service.
“There is only one body of legislation. Large, general-purpose AI systems are trained on information from across the world and the entire internet. That is why they often make mistakes, citing irrelevant websites or inaccurate data. Our solution, by contrast, is a specialized version. We have provided it with the complete body of relevant documentation, so it does not need to search for information or generate assumptions because everything it needs is already there. That is the key difference,” explains Shamshybek Kachkynbay uulu.
At the same time, AiSalyk continues to be refined and improved. To train the assistant, the State Tax Service used real taxpayer inquiries. For several months, the team collected questions and support requests from the help desk, Instagram, and other social media platforms, enabling the system to learn from the situations that users encounter in practice.
“In parallel, we developed our own regulatory knowledge base, Salyk Kenesh. It includes tax legislation, decrees, resolutions, orders, directives, regulations, and other documents used in tax administration. We trained the assistant based on these two components,” — explains Shamshybek Kachkynbay uulu.
At the same time, it is important to remember that AiSalyk is still an AI-powered system. Therefore, its responses should be treated as reference information, and any critical tax-related matters should be verified directly with the State Tax Service.
So, can taxpayers really rely on AiSalyk to independently resolve their key tax-related issues, from calculating taxes to checking outstanding liabilities? The answer appears to be encouraging. After testing the system, Venera Saburova concluded that it is already capable of providing answers to many common taxpayer questions.
“For example, if you want to open an auto repair shop and are unsure about the taxes you would need to pay, you can enter your projected income and the AI will calculate it for you. I double-checked the results, and the calculations were remarkably accurate. You can also compare different tax options. For instance, it can help determine which arrangement would be more beneficial for a particular type of business activity, such as operating under a patent-based regime or registering as an individual entrepreneur,” — says Saburova.
The functionality of the service is expected to expand further. According to Shamshybek Kachkynbay uulu, Director of the state institution Salyk Service under the State Tax Service, new tax-related features and services will be gradually added to AiSalyk over time.
“Going forward, we will continue training and enhancing the system so that users will be able not only to ask questions and receive answers, but also, for example, have the bot prepare reports or even file tax declarations on their behalf,” — says Shamshybek Kachkynbay uulu.
Akchabar decided to test how AiSalyk performs in practice. We asked the chatbot a simple question that concerns many taxpayers: “Do I have any outstanding tax liabilities?”.
A little squirrel appeared on the screen, busily flipping through logbooks — that’s what the animation showing we were waiting for a response looked like. While she was “reviewing the documents,” we waited for the tax verdict. The response came in less than a minute: we owed nothing. We were pleased with the result, because we don’t just write about taxes — we pay them too.
