The Croatian Parliament has voted on a package of amendments to tax laws that includes additional tax relief for entrepreneurial sponsorships of the non-profit sector and socially beneficial activities, as well as administrative relief for entrepreneurs, estimated to be worth 72.6 million euros.
The legal amendments were adopted in an expedited procedure and will come into effect on January 1, 2026, when the Law on Fiscalization regarding the obligation to issue and fiscalize e-Invoices also comes into force.
The amendments to the Corporate Income Tax Act expand the possibility of recognizing costs for sponsorships contracted domestically for cultural, scientific, educational, health, humanitarian, sports, religious, ecological, and other public benefit purposes. For the first time, sponsorship costs are recognized doubly: first as an expense for the entrepreneur, and second as a reduction of the tax base.
The Value Added Tax Act and the General Tax Act have also been amended to align with the Law on Fiscalization, specifically through administrative relief by abolishing certain forms. This pertains to the submission of reports on food donations, maintaining a record of outgoing invoices, and submitting a special record of goods sold to customers within passenger traffic.
The requirement to submit a report on domestic deliveries with the transfer of tax liability is also abolished, and entrepreneurs will no longer have to submit a special record of received invoices. Through the abolition of these forms, the estimated relief for entrepreneurs amounts to 72.64 million euros.
The amendments to the General Tax Act, among other things, stipulate exemptions from the obligation to maintain tax secrecy in the case of exchanging analytical data on the collection of local taxes and income taxes between the Tax Administration and units of local or regional self-government.
The Law on Minimum Global Corporate Tax has also been amended, specifying the calculation of the obligation of qualified domestic supplementary tax paid by subsidiaries of a multinational company.
In this context, two conclusions from the Most Club and independent Josip Jurčević did not receive the necessary majority of votes from representatives, stating that personal data (electronic messages, photographs, documents, health data) must not be subject to tax supervision nor included in access or copying measures, and that the Parliament should be provided with a report on the powers of tax authorities of other EU member states regarding access to and copying of data from citizens’ and entrepreneurs’ personal electronic devices.
The Croatian Parliament has also amended four financial laws – on the issuance of covered bonds and public oversight of covered bonds, on the acquisition of joint-stock companies, on insurance, and on financial conglomerates.
This continues the further alignment of the Croatian regulatory framework with the EU acquis, regarding the introduction of a single European access point, known as ESAP, which will enable all information necessary for making informed investment decisions to be available in one place.
ESAP is expected to make the European Union’s capital market more attractive and provide greater visibility for companies in the European Union and their financial products in relation to the global investment community, thus opening up more potential and favorable sources of financing.
In all four laws, the obligation of HANFA as the body for collecting information is regulated, and it is stipulated that addressees must provide publicly published information to HANFA in a machine-readable format, with mandatory metadata, so that it can forward them to ESAP.
