Frequent Changes to Tax Forms Cost Companies Tens of Thousands of Kuna

In an informal conversation with a lady from an accounting service, I learned that she often has to pay 400 kuna to a programmer to make changes to the forms prescribed by the Tax Administration. These are usually trivial changes to the JOPPD forms, but also others like the OPZ-STAT-1 form. We will focus on these two.

That accounting services and companies with their own accounting departments are often forced to pay programmers for programming services was confirmed by another interlocutor, also an owner of an accounting service. He says that last year he had to spend 28,000 kuna just for these trivial changes. The issue is that the Tax Administration changes the regulations regarding a certain form, so, for example, the line where data is entered moves to another row, or a word that was not necessary is added, disrupting the structure of the form. The situation is particularly interesting when a significant change is made in one regulation, which can be justified as something necessary. And then…

Should it be or not? – For example, they prescribe that in the JOPPD form, in addition to the report on daily allowances, they also require reports on other payments. And then, after a month, they conclude that this is not necessary and change the regulation again, removing it from the form. Because of this, we have to hire a programmer and pay him twice – says the interlocutor, angry about the tax ‘acrobatics’.
The price that the lady from the small accounting service pays to the programmer is 400 kuna, and she says that last year she spent nearly five thousand kuna just because of that. The owner of the accounting service, our second interlocutor, pays for the service between 300 and 500 kuna, but he has three software programs that he uses for clients of different sizes.
A special story is with the OPZ-STAT-1 form, in which entrepreneurs were supposed to enter data about their debtors and indicate how much they owe. Lider wrote about this, and the state’s goal was not to help companies collect debts, but to collect VAT debts. Namely, suppliers of goods/services (with more than three million kuna in revenue) still pay VAT based on unpaid invoices, but if they cannot collect it, they will collect it from the debtors.

The service has become more expensive. The deadline for submitting this data for 2015 was until February 29, but two weeks before the deadline, the Tax Administration postponed it to September 1, when, in addition to 2015, data for the first two quarters of 2016 will also have to be entered. This means a change in the form, so accountants will have to reach into their pockets again. Our interlocutor says that he paid 13,500 kuna to programmers just for preparing that form, and now he will have to change it again, and as he says, he is not sure if something else might change by September 1. He is quite pessimistic.
In the end, it is interesting that these activities of the Tax Administration have caused disruptions in the supply and demand for programming services. As the Tax Administration started changing these forms frequently, programmers became more engaged, demand skyrocketed, and as a result, the price of programming services increased. The price of programming was previously 15 percent of the software value, but as various electronic forms were introduced and frequently changed, that price today amounts to 20 percent of the software value. If the Tax Administration continues to create chaos with frequent changes to forms, it will only harm accounting services and companies, and will not receive information more useful than what it currently obtains.