Only every third company revealed its debtors to the tax authorities

The Tax Administration received data from 147,151 entrepreneurs regarding who has not paid for the delivery of their goods or services by the end of August. Although this obligation was extended until September 1, by which all companies must submit data to the Tax Administration via the OPZ-STAT1 form on who owes them and how much (the previous deadline was February 20, 2016, for the first of four annual submissions), it is evident that just over a third of all registered companies in Croatia complied with this obligation.

According to data from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics, there were 391 thousand companies and crafts registered in Croatia last year, and it is certain that there have not been any significant changes in the first nine months of this year. This means that 37 percent of companies and crafts complied with the obligation to report overdue and unpaid receivables.

The reason for this is the actual situation on the ground, we would say, because when this obligation for companies was introduced, there was immediate doubt about whether they would be able to fully comply. The problem is that we often have a situation where large companies, for example, retail chains, owe small businesses. These small businesses often depend on their large business partners, so although small businesses frequently get angry at them for non-payment, they do not dare to speak out publicly about it. At the beginning of the year, we wrote about this topic in Lider and predicted that many companies would rather risk violating regulations than offend the large ones, and unfortunately, at least according to these numbers sent to us by the Tax Administration, the predictions have come true.

The state introduced this obligation to more efficiently collect VAT. Namely, VAT is paid into the state budget by the company that issued the invoice only if it has managed to collect its receivables or if it has money in the account to pay regardless of whether it has collected the receivables. However, if there is no money in the account, then the state will collect VAT directly from the debtor based on the data it receives through the aforementioned form. Therefore, the state is very much interested in companies reporting their debtors. As for how many debtors have been reported in total and what their total debt to suppliers is, as well as how much VAT the state will be able to collect from that, the Tax Administration, headed by Zdravko Zrinušić, could not say. They only stated that they are currently conducting analyses of the data from the received forms and that the public will be timely informed about it.