On July 28, 2017, TEI filed a letter with the Spanish Tax Agency addressing Ministerial Order HFP/417/2017 of 12 May 2017 (Order), which contains the legal and technical requirements for maintaining value-added tax (VAT) registers in the Spanish Tax Agency’s Immediate Supply of Information System (SII). The Order provides details necessary to implement Royal Decree 596/2016 of 2 December 2016 (Decree), which introduced the SII. SII is the mechanism for taxpayers to maintain VAT records in the Tax Agency’s system on an almost real-time basis, effective July 1, 2017.
The Order provides details regarding the fields, format, and technology required to electronically transmit VAT information to SII, addresses the information taxpayers must remit retroactively for January 1, 2017 through June 30, 2017, specifies additional fields to be added in the last monthly return for taxpayers transitioning to SII, and makes other modifications to the Decree. TEI’s submission notes that taxpayers must align their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and processes to comply with the new requirements, and that such information technology projects generally take at least six to 12 months to implement. Thus, taxpayers implementing the transition to SII have had much difficulty meeting the July 1, 2017 deadline imposed under the Order. TEI urged the Spanish Tax Agency to release clear guidelines to assist taxpayers and tax officials in adapting to the SII requirements and recommended that taxpayers be provided a grace period of at least six months if the taxpayer can demonstrate it is in the process of developing a solution to make its ERP systems compliant with SII.
TEI’s comments were prepared by TEI’s European Indirect Tax Committee, whose co-chairs are Paula Regales and Gorka Echevarria. TEI Tax Counsel, Pilar Mata, coordinated the preparation of the submission.