* Liviu Voinea: "Clearing of VAT for companies which paid this tax without collecting the due invoice would be rather costly and hard to manage"
The Government Ordinance which stipulates the payment of VAT upon collecting the invoice was officially published in the Official Gazette last week. Except that the regulation which will amend the text of the Tax Code is not what businesspeople were expecting.
In short, according to the new Government Ordinance, Value Added Tax will become due upon collection of the payment, but no later than 90 days from the date of its issue, according to Liviu Voinea, secretary of state in the Ministry of Public Finance.
In other words, the maximum deadline for a company to pay VAT to the state has merely been extended, not postponed until collection of the invoice, if the collection happens to take too long.
Moreover, about two weeks ago, Liviu Voinea was saying, that, if the VAT paying-company was unable to collect the invoice even after an additional 30 days, following the initial 90 days after the issuing of the invoice, the VAT paid to the state on the 90th day could be cleared with other amounts owed to the state budget. The new regulation no longer includes that provision.
The official of the Ministry of Public Finance said that the 30 days deadline during which time the VAT should have been settled with other debts was eliminated from the law because "it would have been quite hard to manage".
He said: We realized this would involve huge overhead costs and would also be very hard to verify. At any rate, the law can always be amended later. Next month we will also issue the guidelines for the law...I will also go to Poland, where this system is effectively used and it works, with a 90 days plus 90 days method (ed. note: VAT becomes due after 90 days and it can be settled with other debts owed to
