Latest Amendments to the Rulebook on Value Added Tax regarding Issuance of E-invoices

Author: Legal trainee Sara Keković, Law Firm "VUK Tax Attorneys"

Date: 10th May 2023

With previous amendments to the Rulebook on Value Added Tax (hereinafter: “VAT Rulebook"), which came into effect on 1st February 2023, numerous alignments with other regulations were made, as well as clarifications of certain provisions.

Amongst other, the Article 192 of the VAT Rulebook was also amended, stipulating that an e-invoice can be issued for multiple individual supplies of goods and services within a specified period. In such cases, e-invoice should indicate the date of its issuance as the date of the turnover.

However, provisions of the Article 192, paragraphs 2 and 3, of the VAT Rulebook remained unchanged, which require VAT taxpayers to issue invoices no later than the last day of the calendar month for supplies of goods and services performed in that month.

In relation to the above, there has been an issue in the practice of electronic invoicing where taxpayers were unable to gather all the necessary data required for issuing e-invoices until last day of the calendar month, due to reasons such as last day being a non-working day. Also, when issuing e-invoices for transactions in January 2023, an additional problem arose because the Electronic Invoicing System was not operational for most of the day on 31th January 2023, which further prevented a large number of taxpayers from meeting the specified deadline, and there is no guarantee that such issue would not occur again.

On the other hand, not issuing e-invoices for multiple individual transactions until last day of the calendar month, but rather in the following month, may formally result in challenging customer's right to the deduct input VAT.

In order to rectify these omissions and obstacles that have arisen in the practice of issuing e-invoices, latest amendments to the VAT Rulebook were introduced relatively quickly and came into effect on 1st March 2023.

According to the currently valid provisions of Article 192, paragraph 4, of the VAT Rulebook, exceptionally from paragraphs 2 and 3 of this Article, an e-invoice for multiple supplies of goods or services can be issued after the last day of the calendar month, but no later than 15 days after that.

According to the new paragraph 5 of the Article 192 of the VAT Rulebook, the electronic invoice from paragraph 1 of this Article should indicate the last day of the calendar month as the date of the supply.

These amendments and additions are definitely beneficial for taxpayers and resolve the issue that was evident in practice, especially with the view to providing legal certainty to recipients of e-invoices, regarding their right deduct input VAT stated on e-invoices issued for multiple individual supplies.

Our law firm will follow the upcoming activities in the field of electronic invoicing in a timely manner, in order to provide expert analysis and help with clarifying any uncertainties.