The Bill Amending the Tax and Social Insurance Procedure Code, including also amendments to the VAT Law, has been published

The Bill Amending the Tax and Social Insurance Procedure Code (TSIPC) and the motives thereto have been published on the website of the Ministry of Finance.

The proposed amendments to the TSIPC aim to improve the single account for payment of taxes and mandatory social security contributions and to support obligated persons experiencing temporary financial difficulties. The amendments provide the opportunity principal of taxes and social security contributions whose deadline for payment has expired to be paid first. Thus the accrual of interest is stopped and the accumulation of new liabilities is prevented. 

An opportunity is provided in the proceedings for coercive enforcement under the TSIPC to authorize urgent payments to be made by the debtor for all types of public liabilities.

The application of the order of payment of public liabilities under Article 169 (4) of TSIPC is postponed by one year for those liabilities whose deadline for payment has expired before 1 January 2008.

Amendments to the VAT Law are proposed in the Final Provisions of the Bill whereby reverse charge of VAT is proposed to be applied to a new category of goods – cereals and industrial crops, which are most often used in complex schemes for VAT fraud. The main aim of introducing such measure is to reduce significantly tax fraud and to increase revenues in the short term. 

Thus the proposed legislative changes will put into law part of the measures developed and discussed in the working group within the MoF with representatives of employer organizations, the trade unions, the National Association of Municipalities in Bulgaria and the revenue agencies. The measures aim to ease the administrative burden on the businesses, to increase revenue collection and to improve the work of the revenue agencies.