Fight against VAT fraud in e-commerce – draft amendments to the VAT Act and the National Tax Administration Act.

Despite the holiday period, the legislature is not slowing down and is proposing further amendments to the Law on Value Added Tax and the Law on National Tax Administration. Consultations on the draft ended on August 23 this year, and the planned implementation date for the law is January 1, 2024. The proposed changes are expected to tighten the VAT system in the field of e-commerce. It should be mentioned that the draft prepared by the Ministry of Finance implements the provisions of EU Directive 2020/284 amending EU Directive 2006/112/EC.

The proposed changes impose new obligations on payment service providers, i.e. on domestic banks and branches of foreign banks in relation to cross-border transactions. Such entities will be obliged to:

• Maintaining quarterly records of payments and recipients of payments for payment services provided cross-border, in the event that the payment service provider makes (on a quarterly basis) more than 25 payments for a given payee. The number of payments for a given recipient is calculated separately for each Member State and each identifier (IBAN),
• Keeping records for a period of 3 years from the end of the tax year in which the payment was made,
• Making the records available to the Director of the National Revenue Administration (KAS) in XML format by the end of the month following the end of a given quarter.

The Director of KAS will be responsible for storing the data, and will also maintain them in the intra-Community payment information system (CESOP).

The draft statutory changes clearly indicate which elements should be included in the records kept by payment service providers, such as the date and time of payment or its return.

• The obligation to keep records of the payment service provider applies when the following conditions are met:  Transfer relates to cross-border transactions. That is, the flow of funds takes place between the EU payer and the recipient coming from another EU Member State or from outside the EU,
• The payment service provider made more than 25 cross-border payments to the same payee within 3 months [of a calendar quarter].

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