Authors: David Krch, Jaroslav Šuchman, Martina Sumerauerová
Thanks to the development of IT technology, the possibilities of digitising accounting and tax documents have increased significantly over the last few years. Until a few years ago, only some of our clients worked with digitised documents, now we hardly know anyone who does not use this option in some form, as the digitisation of documents brings many benefits, including significant savings in document archiving costs. As a result, as part of the introduction of new digitisation systems, clients have often asked us recently whether it is possible to digitise accounting and tax documents in order to comply with existing legislation.
The digitisation of ordinary (paper) accounting documents is not regulated in accounting and tax legislation in a way that reflects the current technological possibilities. Our legislation is very outdated in this respect and does not lay down clear rules for the procedure and method of digitisation.
The statutory rules are set out in particular in the Accounting Act and the VAT Act. Conversely, no statutory requirements are specifically regulated by the Income Tax Act. Overall, the available legal requirements can be summarised by stating that archiving original paper documents in electronic form is only possible with the appropriate setting ofinternal document scanning processes.
It should therefore be stressed that simply scanning the invoice received from the supplier without sufficient technological and procedural security is not sufficient and runs the risk that the document thus archived will not be accepted by the tax authorities.
Therefore, based on our consultations with the tax administration authorities regarding this subject to date, please note that even a well-designed internal processes system does not completely eliminate the risk that the tax administration authorities will proceed in a strictly formalistic manner and also require for documents submitted in the electronic version identical documents in (the original) paper form as a condition of tax eligibility for income tax purposes or a condition for claiming an input VAT deduction.
While we have not yet encountered such a purely formalistic approach by the tax administration authorities in our clients’ practice, we caution clients that such a situation cannot be completely ruled out.
In most cases tax documents contain or may contain personal data of individuals, therefore, the personal data protection regulatory rules should also be taken into account when processing such data and the requirements arising from those rules should be complied with.
We are happy to help you with the appropriate setting of electronic document archiving processes in tax and accounting as well as personal data protection and to provide you with detailed information.
