JPK – new instrument by which the Polish treasury will monitor the tax liabilities and reduce tax fraud

According to estimates by taxpayers, the tax gap in VAT is the difference between taxable contributions and those that the treasury actually received. This difference has grown to at least 50 billion Złoty in 2015. In order to improve the recoverability of the amounts subject to VAT, the PiS government is now implementing a new instrument, which is largely independent of the economy, this will revolutionise the entire tax collection system in Poland. Starting from 1^st July, 2016, the first large companies with a turnover of at least EUR 50 million were obliged to submit a unified control file (JPK) to the treasury. At the beginning of the new year, the legal obligation to transfer a JPK now also covers the majority of all companies in Poland.

JPK – Jednolity Plik Kontrolny (German unified control file) – is the name of the new instrument by which the Polish treasury will electronically monitor the tax liabilities of companies and effectively reduce tax fraud. According to a logical structure, companies now need to submit their records to the Finance Department, who then submit their records to the Financial Office. The JPK is made up of seven data structures. They enable the treasury, among others, an accurate analysis of a company’s sales and purchase data, the applied prices, discounts, tax rates, receipts and payments, bank statements and the import and export of the inventory.

Following the introduction of the JPK transfer obligation for large companies last July, small and medium-sized enterprises are now obliged to submit their records from the 1^st January of the new year.

The JPK control file is to be transmitted monthly to the tax office, whereby the areas of the information requested by the treasury are gradually expanded by small and medium-sized enterprises from the underlying values in the course of the year.

From the 1^st January of the coming year, the statutory duty to pay monthly the JPK control file will also be binding for the so-called micro-enterprises (less than 10 employees, turnover below the Złoty equivalent of 2 million EUR).

Source: „Wirtschafts-Markt Polen“, Ausgabe 238