Filenews 31 March 2023
More than 66,000 taxpayers have already been linked in the first four days of operation of TaxForAll (TFA) to a user account for VAT purposes or about 70% of active taxpayers registered in VAT and more than 1,500 payments totalling approximately €15 million were made, while an amount of €1.3 million was returned, said Tax Commissioner Sotiris Markides.
Specifically, Mr. Markides said that as of Monday, March 27, 2023, when the 1st phase of the new Computerized System of the Tax Department TaxForAll is in place, for taxpayers who transact with the Department for VAT purposes, "in addition to 66,000 taxpayers have already been logged in with a user account, ie about 70% of active taxpayers registered in VAT, something that is done gradually and targeted, as he said, "depending mainly on the period of obligation to submit a VAT return or in order to achieve better levels of compliance and service to taxpayers".
He also said that more than 1,500 payments totalling around €15m were made through the TFA, part of which were made via credit cards, while about 2,000 requests were made by taxpayers through the TFA Portal.
In addition, the Tax Commissioner said that more than 300 VAT refund requests totalling approximately €1.3 million were examined. and the amount was returned to the taxpayers.
He noted that through the 17700/22803803 call centre, more than 1,000 calls were answered and served with an average service duration of about 6 minutes.
Mr. Markides expressed satisfaction with the timely implementation of the system, the safe transfer of data from the previous computer system to the TFA, as well as the acceptance of the TFA by users so far.
"Rarely has such a large computerization/software development project of the order of €25 million. to be completed in a reasonable time and to enter an operational phase without any particular problems", he underlined.
The Superintendent of Taxation said that this was a result of the determination of the management of the Tax Department and the Ministry of Finance to implement the project and the importance it has and expressed thanks both to the Officers of the Project Team and the Department who embraced the project, as well as to the contractor and its partners but also to the IT Services Department for the support.
"For the Tax Department that has to manage a wide range of taxes with different legislations, a large amount of information both from taxpayers' Returns and information from various databases both from Cyprus and abroad and the large number of taxpayers, investing in smart modern functional and effective user-friendly computer systems is a one-way street", Underlined.
The priority now, as Mr Markides said, is the implementation of the next two phases of the TFA which concerns all other types of taxes. He expressed the hope that "if all goes well", the TFA will be fully operational by the end of 2024.
Extension to the submission of a Declaration
Finally, the Superintendent of Taxation said that "although so far no problems are observed from the interaction of taxpayers with the TFA, in order to avoid any problems during the first attempts to submit the VAT Returns through the TFA, with an announcement of the Department on 24/3/2023, the following extensions were given:
He stated that for the Tax Period from 01/12/2022 to 28/02/2023 the new date of submission of the VAT Return is April 26, 2023 (instead of April 10, 2023), while for the tax period from 01/01/2023 to 31/03/2023 the new date of submission of the Return is May 26, 2023 (instead of May 10, 2023).
