After the onslaught of changes made to the tax legislation in the last months of last year, the authorities published another law in March that adds new provisions to the Tax Code. The normative act contains several specific fiscal changes, as well as a transposition into the Fiscal Code of an EU Directive on the Central Electronic Information System on Payments (CESOP), which obliges all payment processors operating in the EU – regardless of whether they are banks, IFN- institutions or institutions issuing electronic money – to declare quarterly information to the Tax Office about the cross-border payments made through them.

The novelties were introduced by Law no. 33/2024, which has already entered into force. The law contains several amendments to the Fiscal Code, aimed both at the introduction of specific new rules regarding the adjustments of the VAT tax bases in the case of price reductions, as well as clarifications regarding the submission of the VAT declaration 308 regarding electronic commerce.

Thus, the possibility of adjusting the VAT tax base is introduced for price reductions granted after the delivery of goods/services and in situations where they are not granted directly to customers. By way of exception, if the price reductions are not granted directly to the customer, the suppliers of goods and/or service providers must issue for each fiscal period a centralizing document in order to adjust the tax base.

It has also been clarified that companies applying the special VAT regimes for e-commerce must submit the declaration 308 by the end of the month following each relevant tax period, regardless of whether the deadline falls on a non-working day (weekend or public holiday).

Law no. 33/2024 also transposes into the Fiscal Code an EU directive from 2020 (Directive 284), which must enter into force in all member states starting on January 1, 2024. The directive provides for several measures aimed at improving the VAT fraud detection process, especially with regard to e-commerce, and among them is the introduction of a new obligation for payment service providers in the European Union, who must, starting in 2024, monitor and transmit quarterly data about the payments they process and about their beneficiaries, if they make more than 25 cross-border payments to the same beneficiary every quarter.

The first reporting of this kind will be done on April 30, 2024 for the first quarter of this year, and ANAF must soon approve both the reporting form (which will be a standard one, harmonized at EU level) and the detailed instructions for this new obligation. Among other things, the information that will have to be reported refers to the BIC code, data about the payee, data about the payment or the return of the payment as well as information about the location of the payer. Data will be reported at the transaction level, not globally, in electronic format via an XML file.

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.

The CESOP regulations require reporting only by payment service providers established in the European Union – regardless of whether they are banks, IFNs or institutions issuing electronic money – that provide the following types of services:

• execution of payment operations and fund transfers in payment accounts;
• execution of payment operations covered by a credit line;
• issuing payment instruments and purchasing payment operations;
• remittance of money.

The regulations exempt from the reporting obligation, among others, the deposit and withdrawal of cash, payment initiation services, as well as activities that only involve the provision of 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