Businesses seek postponement of the VAT submission deadline

TIRANA, May 31 – Under a new regulation, all businesses that are subject to the VAT will need to submit their sales and purchases ledgers to the local branches of the tax administration by the fifth day of each month. The news of this regulation has caused great confusion among large businesses that have a high volume of accounting, urging businesses to ask for the postponement of the VAT submission deadline to the tenth day of each month.
To conform to the regulation, they need to collect a large amount of bills or seek information from their branches in the districts. The problem becomes even more acute, businesses say, when after the first experience with the system, a good portion of the staff in charge of the filing had to stay all night at the computer in the hope that the system will accept their claims, as it was experiencing problems due to the high traffic of users. These concerns were presented at a meeting of the AmCham Tax and Legal Committee.
Chaired by the committee head, Genc Boga, the meeting dealt in length with what AmCham should do to offer constructive help on this issue. Members spoke about their experiences and about how changes in tax procedures coming through the instructions by the tax authorities are affecting their businesses.
“Our supplementary costs have increased a lot, because to close up all accounting within five days, we need additional workers,” members said at the Tax and Legal Committee meeting. AmCham members also spoke about the problems they faced in their first experience with the online declaration of the VAT. They mentioned that the online system has notable problems with it, ranging from the format of documents to making it even more difficult to upload the statements by the fifth day of every month. Discussing on how AmCham can help to resolve a situation, members want the chamber to make a request to the General Tax Director to ask for the postponement of the VAT submission deadline. Taking into account these concerns and the fact that although the decision in question has had its own arguments, the businesses’ concerns had not been taken into consideration, the Am-Cham said it will ask the General Tax Director to change this date from the 5th to 10th as a solution that would give businesses more time to prepare.