Tax certificates obtained electronically starting from 1 March

The Tax Administration has made a major step towards establishing a better business environment and cutting the red tape and since 1 March, it enabled the option of obtaining certificates of paid taxes electronically, which would generate savings of at least 2 million EUR a year for the citizens and businesses. 

The establishing of electronic service has partially resolved the longest-lasting Grey Book recommendation, back from 2009, and one of the priority appeals by NALED members. Citizens and businesses have selected this procedure as the most urgent to be digitalized within the campaign Ask WHEN, implemented by NALED in 2018 with the aim of improving the public services. 

Obtaining a tax certificate is one of the most frequent administrative procedures bearing in mind that this document is required for participation in tenders, for numerous bank procedures, for registration or de-registration from the registries etc. Since these tasks require filing both the national Tax Administration and local tax administration certificate on the termination of tax liabilities or their regular settling, it was not an uncommon case that the validity of one document (five days) expires before obtaining the other (deadline for issuing the certificate is 15 days), placing businesses in the center of a vicious circle of bureaucracy, which is no longer the case.

- The Tax Administration, along with the Business Rgisters Agency, is one of the leading institutions in terms of electronic services, and it is important to stress that they have developed these services independently. In the next phase of development, the system should enable businesses to also obtain local tax administration certificates electronically, while eliminating the accompanying fees – said Jelena Bojović, NALED Policy Director.

The problem with fees is that both fees, amounting to a total of 620 RSD (for filing a request and for obtaining the document) have been maintained, the same as when the procedure was performed by visiting a counter. Since the fee should resemble the real cost of providing the service, NALED maintains a view that the fees for electronic services should not be charged, given that most of the work i performed by the software and not the officers. Hence we appeal that the Ministry of Finance should eliminate the fees for this procedure.

NALED also proposes that citizen and businesses should be exempted from enclosing proof of paid taxes for any procedures with state institutions, given that institutions can obtain this information electronically from the Tax Administration, which is already prescribed by the law.

NALED finds that the new electronic service represents an important step in implementing the Tax Administration transformation program. Given that Tax Administration annually issues 750,000 certificates, and a large number of employees are engaged on this task, now is the chance to assign them some other tasks while improving the efficiency of Tax Administration.