The Inspection That Wouldn’t End
How Poland’s Tax Authorities Stretch the Clock—and What Entrepreneurs Can Do About It
There is a particular kind of bureaucratic torment that Polish entrepreneurs know well but rarely discuss in polite company. It begins with a letter—official, terse, bearing the insignia of a revenue office—announcing a tax inspection. What follows, in theory, is a bounded procedure: the state examines your books, determines whether you’ve paid what you owe, and moves on. In practice, the inspection can metastasize into something far more debilitating: months, sometimes years, of rolling demands for documents, witness examinations that lead nowhere, and a creeping paralysis that seeps into every corner of the business. Contracts stall. Counterparties grow wary. Cash flow tightens. And still the inspectors come, armed with new questions about old transactions.
The protracted tax inspection is one of the most corrosive barriers to doing business in Poland. The law sets clear limits on how long an inspection may last. The problem is that the authorities have become adept at circumventing them—and that entrepreneurs, unaware of their rights, let them.
Two Systems, One Problem
Polish tax law provides two principal mechanisms for scrutinizing a taxpayer’s affairs, each with its own procedural architecture and each capable, in the wrong hands, of dragging on interminably.
The first is the standard tax inspection, conducted by the head of the local tax office. Its purpose is straightforward: to verify whether the taxpayer has complied with the tax code. Unlike the lighter-touch verification procedures that precede it, a full inspection triggers the evidentiary machinery of formal tax proceedings—witness testimony, document requests, forensic accounting. It concludes with the delivery of an inspection protocol, a document that either identifies irregularities or gives the taxpayer a clean bill of health. From that point, the taxpayer has fourteen days to amend a return or file objections. In principle, the process is crisp. In practice, it can sprawl.
The second mechanism is the customs-and-revenue inspection, introduced under Poland’s National Revenue Administration Act and conducted by the heads of customs-and-revenue offices—a more powerful and broadly scoped instrument. Its jurisdiction extends well beyond tax compliance to encompass customs and foreign-exchange regulations, anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing rules, and gambling law. Where the statute is silent, the Tax Ordinance fills the gaps. Crucially, a customs-and-revenue inspection can be converted, mid-stream, into full tax proceedings—which means that its effective duration often extends far beyond the delivery of the inspection’s formal findings.
The risk, in both cases, is the same. The longer an inspection runs, the heavier the burden on the business—and the greater the temptation for the authority to use the extra time not to resolve the case but to go fishing for irregularities that might justify the effort already expended.
The Limits and the Loopholes
Poland’s Entrepreneurs’ Rights Act imposes concrete caps on inspection duration: twelve business days for micro-enterprises, scaling up to forty-eight for the largest firms. Exceeding these limits is a legal violation, and evidence gathered after the deadline may, in principle, be inadmissible against the taxpayer.
In principle. The authorities, however, command an arsenal of procedural devices for stretching the clock: suspending proceedings, incorporating materials from parallel investigations, issuing serial requests for additional documentation, and—most notoriously—initiating criminal fiscal proceedings whose sole practical effect is to freeze the statute of limitations on tax obligations. In these instances, the protracted inspection assumes a veneer of legality even as it crosses the line into institutional overreach.
This is why it matters—urgently—for the entrepreneur to know and assert her rights from the first day of an inspection, and to document every procedural misstep as it occurs. Protracted inspections rarely announce themselves. They accrete, gradually, through a series of small delays and unreturned calls—and the business owner who fails to track the deadlines in real time loses the ability to challenge the process later.
Two Remedies, Often Confused
The law arms taxpayers with tools to fight back, but deploying them effectively requires an understanding of a distinction that is easy to miss.
Administrative inaction—bezczynność organu, in the Polish legal vernacular—occurs when the authority simply fails to act within the time prescribed by law. No decision is issued, no resolution reached. The machinery of the state sits idle.
A protracted inspection, by contrast, involves a different pathology: the authority is nominally active—issuing summonses, requesting files, scheduling hearings—but at a pace grotesquely disproportionate to the complexity of the matter, stretching the proceedings without justifiable cause.
In either case, the taxpayer may file a complaint with the provincial administrative court. The complaint may challenge inaction alone, protracted conduct alone, or—as frequently happens—both. If the court finds merit, it can order the authority to act within a specified deadline, formally declare that the delay was attributable to the authority’s fault, and, in egregious cases, award the entrepreneur a monetary sum and open the path to a full damages claim against the state.
Why Early Intervention Changes Everything
The most consequential decision an entrepreneur makes during a tax inspection is not how to respond to the final protocol. It is whether to engage professional counsel at the outset—before the delays begin, before the deadlines lapse, before the procedural record is locked in.
Proper preparation for both tax and customs-and-revenue inspections, combined with real-time oversight of the authority’s compliance with statutory deadlines, can materially shorten the process and prevent the kind of slow-motion procedural abuse that turns a routine inspection into an existential threat.
Skarbiec Legal provides comprehensive representation throughout the inspection lifecycle and in disputes with the tax authorities—from pre-inspection preparation and deadline monitoring through complaints against inaction and protracted conduct, to judicial challenges against assessments issued in violation of the law.
Unduly prolonged inspection / Protracted tax inspection – Further reading
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
