As regards the new electronic invoicing obligations, which will generally come into force in Italy as of January 1st 2019 (except for transactions between contractors and their subcontractors in public procurement and supplies of fuel occurring along the relevant supply chain before final sales at the gas stations, for which new obligation started on July 1st 2018).
As regards the new electronic invoicing obligations, which will generally come into force in Italy as of January 1st 2019 (except for transactions between contractors and their subcontractors in public procurement and supplies of fuel occurring along the relevant supply chain before final sales at the gas stations, for which new obligation started on July 1st 2018).
A number of initial problems have occurred in the initial legislation
As per Italian regulations (art 1, par 3, legislative decree 127/15) such an obligation refers to both established and (not resident but) identified VAT payers.
For this purpose, however, an EU Council derogation (under art 235 VAT directive) was necessary since: i) as per art 218 of the directive there can’t be any difference between paper and electronic invoices, as they are equivalent) as per art. 232 of the directive, the use of an electronic invoice shall be subject to the acceptance by the recipient.
The fact is that both Italian request to the Council for a derogation and subsequent EU Council decision (execution decision 16/04/18,n. 2018/593) authorizing Italy to derogate from the directive and consider the electronic invoicing as mandatory. They point out that derogation is just about invoices issued by established VAT payers. And thus, as per Italian regulations identified VAT payers were obliged to raise electronic invoices, while on the basis of EU authorization they were not.
Such a discrepancy has been overcome by memo n.13 issued by Agenzia delle Entrate on July 2nd 2018. Bearing in mind that interpretation of domestic regulations must be compliant with EU VAT provisions, it comes to the conclusion that resident VAT payers only will be obliged to raise electronic invoices.
Memo 13/18 goes further as it takes into account the “client side” too. In this regard, it maintains that it will be possible (note: not mandatory but merely possible) to issue electronic invoices to identified VAT payers, provided that they can get, upon request, paper invoices.
This means that supplies to/from non-resident VAT payers do not fall within the electronic invoicing obligations.
Such transactions, however, will have to be the object of new listings, to be submitted to Italian VAT administration by the end of the month following the one of the invoice date (sales invoices) or of the receiving date (purchase invoices).
In this regard it has been pointed out by Agenzia delle Entrate that the receipt date corresponds to the day the purchase invoices have been posted on VAT ledgers.
New listings contents are not known yet; it is however likely that they will be very similar to those related to the present invoice data listings.
The above information was kindly provided by Alessandro Garzon from Italy. If you need any further information you can directly contact Alessandro, email to: [email protected]
