Standard audit file for tax purposes (SAF-T)

More efficient and effective tax inspections

OECD has developed a data standard to establish one unique standard for exchange of tax data between companies and tax authorities. This standard is called SAF-T: Standard audit file for tax purposes which is intended to provide tax authorities easy access to the relevant data in an easily readable format.

The OECD’s Committee on Fiscal Affairs (CFA) recently approved two notes arising to develop a set of guidance on business accounting system data requirements for tax audit purposes, and associated practical implementation issues for software developers.

The aims of the guidance are to simplify tax compliance and tax audit requirements as they relate to information required for tax purposes from business and accounting systems. This leads to much more efficient and effective tax inspections.

Every company with SAF-T-requirement is facing the challenge to find an easy and reliable way to deliver the requested SAF-T data. Multinational companies must do so for various countries in a consistent, easy to control approach.

SAF-T a worldwide trend

Efficient use of technology lowers costs of data collection and compliance. More and more tax administrations around the world are implementing electronic auditing of a business’s financial records and systems.

Countries are adopting tools that can interrogate such records on the basis that they must support the standard audit file for tax (SAF-T) methodology. 

Portugal was the first European country that requires large companies to use periodic SAF-T type of reporting. Besides Portugal similar obligations exist already in Austria, France, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland and Spain. In Belgium, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Malta, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, the Netherlands and UK discussions about SAF-T type of reporting are taking place.

Although the SAF-T model is an OECD standard countries do implemented in different ways with country specific templated. Until know only Luxembourg has fully implemented the OECD standard. All other countries do deviate more (Portugal, Poland, France, Italy, Spain) of less (Norway, Lithuania) from the OECD SAF-T standard

Countries like Sweden and Netherlands have their own 'e-audit file' standard

The reason for this trend is clear: e-filing considerably eases processing of VAT/GST returns for tax administrations and makes tax audits faster and more efficient.

In addition, having electronic data enables tax administrations to use IT-based audit tools more easily, which can help to combat fraud and evasion.

SAP support

SAP’s own solution is in practice often not considered flexible enough when it relates to response time on new law changes when new or additional requirements are issued. As a consequence this has a considerable impact on company’s IT resources to implement.

Besides that it is not possible to combine data from different sources or even from different SAP systems (i.e. business line running on multiple SAP systems within one legal entity)..

The minimum requirement of a solution are that any legal changes can be implemented within a short period of time (e.g. one week in

Our SAF-T solutions

To comply with the SAF-T reporting requirements we provide a lean and flexible solution which extracts relevant data directly from SAP systems and transforms this into the country specific XML format and it includes standard control reports in spreadsheet forms.

These SAF-T solution are available for Portugal, Lithuania and Poland in an outsourcing model and for Poland in an end-use computing model.