Obligations of traders to provide non-cash payments

As part of the amendment package under the noisy name Polish Deal, which most of the solutions entered into force at the beginning of January 2022, to stimulate a new impetus for a gradually growing market trend in non-cash payments, and at the same time to counter and combat the black economy mainly around cash transactions [1] , the home legislature has decided to impose on a significant part of entrepreneurs an obligation to ensure that payment can be made using a payment instrument within the meaning of Act dated 19 August 2011 payment services.

This is a regulation added here. Under Article 19a Business Law Act. According to this provision, the provision of payments, inter alia, through payment terminals, concerns traders obliged to keep records of sales using register offices within the meaning of the Goods and Services Tax Act, i.e. entrepreneurs from certain sectors, who sell to non-business individuals and flat-rate farmers.

Moreover, this obligation must be fulfilled at any place where the economic activity is actually carried out, in particular in the premises and outside the premises of the undertaking or in the vehicle used for the provision of passenger transport services.

Additional noveum, with which some entrepreneurs will struggle from 1 July 2022, it will be mandatory to ensure cooperation between the payment terminal used and the register box, enabling the connection and transmission of data between the cash register and the Central Repository of Kas.

It is so-called online cash registers that, in real time, through the telecommunications network, directly, continuously and automatedly allow the fiscal monitoring and analysis of data on events occurring in connection with the operation of the cash registers, including type, quantity and time of sale, as well as data on events recorded in the memory of the recording banks relevant to their work, including fiscalisation of the cash registers, changes in tax rates, changes in the address of the point of sale, or the date of technical reviews.

In the margins, it should be recalled that the legislator has provided for a number of tax preferences to encourage as many entrepreneurs as possible to implement online cash registers in their companies.

Here you can change fast (15-day-to-day payment of VAT for so-called non-cash taxable persons (at least the share of non-cash transactions recorded on online or virtual cash registers) 80%), whether the relief for the expenditure related to the acquisition and operation of the terminal (e.g. intercharge charges or system charges).

Finally, it should be pointed out that the undertakings concerned by the regulation must bear in mind that, in the light of the Goods and Services Tax Act, the failure to ensure cooperation between the online cash register and the payment terminal used has been subject to a penalty of 5,000 PLN, imposed by decision of the Chief of Revenue.

Given the short deadline for the implementation of this cooperation between fiscal cash registers and payment terminals, entrepreneurs should already consider taking appropriate steps to make good the rules under consideration.