Exclusive/ Which entities are "targeted" for the bills? - Binaj: The action will be extended throughout the country, aiming to increase food security
The tax administration has launched a field campaign to ensure that all agricultural and livestock products in the country are purchased with invoices. In an exclusive interview with journalist Elisabeta Dosku on SCAN TV, the Director General of Taxes, Ilir Binaj, explained what the purpose of the campaign is for issuing invoices for the purchase of agricultural and livestock products and where it will extend.
I wanted to clarify regarding this action due to the fact that there has been some confusion about who the subjects of our controls are.
Which entities are included in this control?
Of course, all the entities that we bring out for inspection come out after a risk analysis, that is, looking at the turnover, what products they sell, and so on, and the entities are never farmers, nor are they street vendors, but are only businesses that sell these types of products. It is necessary to understand who is responsible for each actor in the food chain for agricultural and livestock products produced in Albania. So, when a farmer produces a product and wants to sell it to a collector or a market, or a restaurant, or a hotel, he is not obliged to issue an invoice, nor is the livestock farmer, but the invoice must be issued by the person who buys it, which could be the market, collector or restaurant, so he must make himself an invoice. With the issuance of this autoinvoice, which has the name of the farmer who sells the products, at this moment these types of products are entered into the fiscal system, so they are registered as such and at this moment we also have traceability, from who created these products and who sold them. Further on, the chain continues from the collector, they can go and be sold to a trader or they can also go for export. And this is also our goal, to start increasing this type of autoinvoice from businesses that buy agricultural or livestock products from our farmers or livestock keepers. This will be, in our understanding, an improvement in food safety and a higher formalization of the market.
So, even if these structures you mentioned buy from collectors and not directly from farmers, they must follow the same procedure.
Then, the collector in this case is a business and in this sense he sells with the invoices that he has within our fiscal system, so when the collector sells, he issues his invoice and it is a purchase invoice for markets or other entities that use these types of products. So the self-invoice is valid only for farmers or livestock farmers, not for other entities. We have about 100 thousand farmers registered in our tax system who have the opportunity to be issued self-invoices for the products that they sell to collectors or other commercial entities that are not collectors.
Every action is accompanied by a kind of fear for farmers who are not well informed about tax procedures, the law... Should ordinary farmers be afraid of this action or will nothing change for them?
Our goal is never to scare anyone, neither citizens nor traders, but it is simply always the part to educate or enforce the law so in this case for farmers, but even for other businesses, they should not be afraid, but should start enforcing the law if they have not implemented it so far, or have thought that they can escape without being caught by law enforcement agencies. In the case of farmers, as I explained, they have no obligation whatsoever regarding the issuance of invoices but must receive the invoices issued by the person who buys them in order to document their purchases. But in any case, at the end of the day, our controls will only be related to entities that buy from them, so they can be collectors, slaughterhouses, they can be traders, restaurants, etc., so these types of entities that buy their products from farmers and for one reason or another, during this period have not issued an invoice for the products they have purchased.
Where are the hottest "hotspots", so are we talking about hotel structures in coastal areas or is there a uniform spread of this action throughout Albania?
It is not that we divide them into hot or not hot spots, for us they are all subjects. Certainly the largest volume of transactions and business is concentrated in the Tirana area and certainly the number of controls that we will exercise will be higher in Tirana and lower in other districts due to the fact that this is where the majority of transactions related to these types of products are concentrated.
Will there be an end date for this action or will it be ongoing and what are the results you expect to obtain at the end of it?
The results are a greater education of all actors in the food chain, citizens, traders, collectors, and farmers, so that a higher degree of formalization increases. We do not have a date for the action to close, due to the fact that we are watching the progress and results. Of course, these types of controls take their time and this time we have tried to make them as in-depth and qualitative as possible. All the controls that were carried out yesterday had problems with goods without invoices, almost all of them had this type of problem, so they were not able to prove the origin of the goods that were available in their stores or points of sale, so for this reason we have not set ourselves a deadline, the control will continue until we exhaust our risk criteria and understand that we have an improvement in the situation regarding the food chain.
And what are the penalties that entities that continue to be caught without the relevant invoices risk in this case?
Penalties are defined in the tax procedures law, so there are penalties for goods without an invoice and penalties related to not issuing a tax invoice and then when this continues, other penalties continue again for not issuing an invoice then you can have turnover revaluations and so on. But let's not talk about penalties, let's talk about educating and improving the behavior of all actors in the food chain.
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