The first CESOP reports, which must be sent to the tax authorities by the end of this month, will be made by the payment processors for the last hundred meters, given that the National Fiscal Administration Agency has just published, currently in draft form, the tax form that will need to be completed for reporting cross-border payments. The form to be introduced by ANAF in the fiscal circuit will have to be adopted and quickly published in the Official Gazette to allow companies to submit it by the April 30 deadline.

The tax authorities have released for public debate the draft form 396, which will have to be submitted quarterly by payment processors together with an XML file for transaction-level reporting of cross-border payments. This form, called “Informative statement regarding cross-border payments made by payment service providers” is of an informative type, so it does not generate any kind of payment obligations.

Form 396 appears with an obvious delay, less than three weeks before the filing deadline, but this cannot surprise us, considering that the general framework for assuming this new obligation in the Fiscal Code was published only recently. We remind you that the new CESOP reports, although mandatory by directive from January 1, 2024 in all EU member states, were transposed into our legislation only last month through Law no. 33/2024.

The new tax form will be submitted through the e-guvernare.ro portal, the ANAF declaration submission section, in the form of a PDF file with attached XML, electronically signed, by means of remote transmission.

Form 396 has several sections, and payment service providers must fill in, in addition to their identification data (name, legal form, registered office address and tax and commercial identification codes), detailed details of the transactions they broker, including: the identification code and the name of the beneficiary of the payment, the VAT/NIF code and the identification number of the beneficiary’s account, the BIC code or other relevant identifier, the beneficiary’s address and information about any refunds, as well as exact data on the date, time, amount or currency of the transaction.

In the event that payment service providers find certain errors in the originally submitted form, they can correct the information related to the erroneous data by submitting a new form (396), at the latest before the end of the 5-year data retention period.

The data declared through this new form will be stored centrally in a European database called the Central Electronic System for Information on Payments (CESOP), the purpose of this system is to provide anti-fraud experts in the EU member states with the information they need to identify more easily foreign sellers who supply goods or provide services in their territory.

Who must submit the form and for what types of payments

The reporting obligation is incidental to four categories of payment service providers: credit institutions (banks, IFNs, leasing), institutions issuing electronic money, payment institutions, as well as postal transfer institutions that provide payment services. However, reports must not be made for any payment service, but only for those aimed at the execution of payment operations and fund transfers to payment accounts, the execution of payment operations covered by a line of credit, the issuance of payment instruments and the purchase of payment operations or remittance of money. Exempted from reporting are, among others, services such as: cash deposit and withdrawal, payment initiation services, as well as activities that only involve providing account information.

It is also worth noting that not all payments must be reported, there are several conditions that trigger the reporting obligation: the payer is in the EU and makes more than 25 cross-border payments to the same beneficiary every quarter. These two conditions must be verified and met each calendar quarter.

Article published in TaxNews.ro