14 Apr 2020

New tax challenges

By EY Poland

Multidisciplinary professional services organization - Assurance, Consulting, Tax, Strategy & Transactions

14 Apr 2020
Related topics Tax

The state income and the taxation of businesses are a hot topic. As a consequence of the dynamics of changes and the development of new technologies, tax laws and the rules concerning the relations between the tax administration and taxpayers need to be redefined. Given these circumstances, maintaining tax security is a real challenge.

A Standard Audit File for Tax (SAF-T) is a new solution. With this file, taxpayers submit their financial data to the tax administration, which thus may access the information from the entire banking system at any time and publicly disclose the data of the biggest taxpayers. Development of additional solutions making tax settlements more convenient is thus crucial to maintain tax security.

What solutions do other countries use?

  • Greece and Turkey

    Turkey and Greece are a particularly interesting example, as the independent tax audit was initially a must, not an option there. Despite no longer being a mandatory requirement, independent tax audit is still a solution that is widely and willingly used by taxpayers to confirm the correctness of their tax settlements and procedures.

    They introduced a uniform standard of an audit performed on an on-going basis by independent entities.

  • Netherland and Russia

    These countries introduced the horizontal monitoring (cooperative compliance) solution, i.e. changed the model of cooperation with taxpayers.

  • Germany

    The country introduced official minimum procedure requirements that are to ensure personal security of taxpayers’ management boards.

  • Spain, Portugal, Hungary, France

    These countries introduced uniform, standardised forms of tax reporting and their automatic verification (e.g. SAF-T, IDR, FEC).

How to safely verify tax data?

Based on the above-listed examples of other countries, the established expertise, and the long-term experience of our auditors, we decided to present the possibility to verify tax settlements based on the uniform audit standard we defined.

The scope of audit is modified exclusively with reference to the scale and the specificity of a company’s operations. A positive Certification Opinion is conditional on EY’s implementation of complete audit procedures in the scope defined by us, and on the unambiguous confirmation of the correctness of the settlements analysed.

Summary

The principles presented serve the implementation of the main idea of the EY Tax Certification Program , i.e. they help in increasing the certainty of business transactions and in building the trust between taxpayers and the tax administration, or among the very taxpayers.

About this article

By EY Poland

Multidisciplinary professional services organization - Assurance, Consulting, Tax, Strategy & Transactions

Related topics Tax