Change of deadline for response to calls for VAT Ledger Statement

There are always several changes every year in the tax world, and 2023 is not different. One of the changes is setting deadlines for responding to the tax administrator's call for a subsequent vat ledger statement. Specifically, there was a change in the wording of § 101g of the Value Added Tax Act. This means that the deadline by which the VAT payer has to submit a subsequent VAT ledger statement was affected.

The deadline until the end of 2022 was 5 working days from receiving the call from the Czech Tax Authority. This notification was made by delivering a call, i.e., by reading a message from the data box or by the expiration of a fictitious 10-day period, if the message was not picked up. It was thus possible to partially manipulate the term by later "picking" the call from the data box. However, different rules applied to those VAT payers to whom the relevant notices were delivered by e-mail, when the date of delivery was the day the e-mail was sent from the e-mail box of the tax administrator. This led to some kind of inequality between VAT payers.

From the beginning of 2023, there was a change, which consisted in fixing the date from which the deadline for responding to the call begins to be calculated. Newly, this deadline is set as the day of delivery of the request to the data box of the recipient, i.e., the VAT payer. Therefore, it is no longer relevant when the message is read (or "picked"), but when it was delivered. In other words, "picking" the data box no longer plays a role.

A period of 17 calendar days is set from the above-mentioned date. Please note that the maximum period for the receiving for of the call before the change was similar – i.e., according to the so-called delivery fiction (see above), the message is delivered 10 calendar days after the delivery of the data message to the recipient's mailbox. The subsequent response time was 5 working days. Therefore, the maximum period was 17 days.

The above is thus the result of a compromise between the taxpayer, for whom the non-extendable period of 5 working days often meant a strict deadline, and the Czech tax administrator, who must process and evaluate the received VAT reports.

For the sake of completeness, it is also appropriate to add that the described change only applies to the request of the tax administrator regarding the already submitted VAT ledger statement. If the statement was not submitted at all within the specified period and the payer is therefore called to submit it by the tax administrator, he must do so within a replacement period of 5 calendar days from the delivery of the invitation.

In general, it can therefore be said that we highly recommend detailed monitoring of your data boxes so that you do not miss any call from the tax administrator. As part of our services, we also provide data mailbox monitoring. If you are interested or have further questions, do not hesitate to contact our experts.