The e-Transport system has, since July, a new application procedure, the old one being removed and completely replaced. Although the new procedure maintains most of the previous provisions, which it only expands so as to cover also the international transport of goods, it also introduces additions, updates and new functionalities, which did not exist in the previous regulation.

The National Tax Administration Agency and the Romanian Customs Authority have published Joint Order no. 1.337/1.268/2024 which approves a new procedure for the use and operation of the national system for monitoring the transport of goods RO e-Transport. This replaces the previous procedure established by ANAF Order no. 2.545/2022, currently repealed. The new procedure applies from July and brings some important changes and clarifications for companies.

For national transports, the reporting rules remain largely the same, the novelty being rather their extension to international freight transports, also included in the scope of e-Transport reporting this year. Thus, the new procedure establishes that for the international transport of goods, reports will be made for all transported goods, regardless of whether they are risky or not from a fiscal point of view, but the same significance criteria established for national transport must be met – vehicles are subject to obtaining UIT code if they have a technically permissible maximum mass of at least 2.5 tons and are loaded with goods with a total gross mass greater than 500 kg or a total value greater than 10,000 lei, related to at least one batch of goods that makes the object of transport.

The new procedure also brings a series of important clarifications related to multimodal transports, establishing that, if the goods for which there is an obligation to report in the RO e-Transport System are transported at national level with means of transport from several categories (naval, rail, air, road, etc.), only the road transport component will be declared in the RO e-Transport System. In such situations, the place of loading, respectively unloading, will be considered the place where the road transport vehicle will pick up or hand over the transported goods.

Other additions to the procedure compared to the previous version aim at a series of clarifications and clarifications necessary to manage all kinds of specific situations that frequently arise in the case of road transport. For example, the mention appears that, in the case of import operations, the value of the declared goods is the value entered in the external invoice, and the need for UIT codes is clarified in situations where the goods are not received or are partially received and must be returned.

Thus, the procedure states that goods not received will return to the loading warehouse or the nearest warehouse of the sender based on the original UIT code, while for goods that have been received and for which a subsequent return is made, it will be necessary to obtain a new UIT code by the party returning the goods (subsequent return being considered to form a new batch of goods). Similarly, in the case of an international transport of goods with a supplier from Romania, the subsequent return of the goods that have been received forms a new batch of goods for which it is necessary to obtain a new UIT code by the original supplier.

The new procedure also introduces the option to confirm the data declared in the system after obtaining the UIT code. More precisely, the functionalities newly introduced in the e-Transport system allow a user to select, as appropriate, one of the following variants regarding a transport: “Confirmed”, “Partially confirmed” or “Confirmed”, but also to make additional clarifications in connection with the transport in the data field “Confirmation comment”.

New clarifications also appear related to the transport of goods with high fiscal risk traded in the cash and carry system. The procedure specifies that for such products, which the customer chooses from the shelf, pays for at the cash registers and transports in his own name, there are no reporting obligations in the RO e-Transport system.

An entirely new set of provisions lays down the rules for real-time monitoring of shipments, an obligation that has become mandatory since July. Monitoring will be possible either through automatic GPS devices that allow the automatic transmission of positioning data to the ANAF servers – for vehicles equipped with such systems, or through mobile phones on which the e-Transport application has been installed and which must be activated by the driver before the start of the transport and deactivated after delivery, when the transport has ended, or after leaving the national territory.

Article published in TaxNews