Putting it off is expensive
Whatever your opinion on the regulations on data access and auditability of digital documents (GDPdU), the fact is that the fiscal authority will exercise its right to carry out digital tax audits! This point was hammered home by Bernhard Lindgens, from the German Finance Ministry at our SERinForum on the GDPdU regulations.
Even if your next tax audit is a long way off, putting the issue off could be an expensive mistake from two points of view. Firstly, you spoil the atmosphere of the audit and run the risk of having penalties imposed on you. And secondly, preparing your tax-relevant data retrospectively – assuming this is at all possible – can be extremely time-consuming and expensive. You should be particularly wary of exposing your organisation to this risk if you are unable to store your tax-relevant data for 10 years or more in your productive system or if you have plans to change your productive system or parallel systems.
All tax-relevant data originally produced in electronic form must be stored digitally, i.e. not only data from the productive system, but also data from upstream, downstream and parallel data-processing systems. The (additional) retention of paper records is not sufficient!
You must ensure that all tax-relevant data can be analysed electronically. The analysis possibilities must be the same in terms of quality and quantity as those of the productive system at the time the data were produced. The data must also be stored in an analysable format. Storing data exclusively in the form of TIF and PDF files does not comply with the requirements of the fiscal authority.
In order to comply with the requirements concerning the provision of data carriers in particular, structural information must be assigned to archived tax-relevant data. We recommend data export to the electronic archive of the DOXiS iECM Suite in line with the GDPdU description standard stipulated by the fiscal authority.
