Check acquisitions – a new control tool in the fight against the grey market
As of 1 January 2022, employees and officers of the National Tax Administration have been given a new power – the ability to make so-called verification acquisitions. This is a mechanism allowing verification whether entrepreneurs correctly record sales with fiscal cash registers and issue receipts. As the data from the NIK report shows, this tool is intensively used by the tax services.
In 2022, 56.5 thousand checking acquisitions were carried out across the country. They resulted in the imposition of 13.5 thousand fines for a total amount of PLN 18.2 million. On the other hand, in the first half of 2023, the number of checks amounted to 26.7 thousand, resulting in 7.2 thousand fines amounting to PLN 10.6 million.
Check acquisitions – how does it work in practice?
The foundation of the system is special company payment cards, assigned to a dedicated check acquisition fund. The number of cards issued is steadily increasing – from 2,300 at the beginning of 2022 to 2,500 by mid-2023. However, the amounts used from the fund are not dizzying – less than 700,000 were issued in the whole of 2022 and around 275,000 in the first half of 2023.
The inspection itself begins long before the official enters the shop or premises. First, the immediate supervisor must issue a written order specifying, among other things, the limit of funds allocated for the inspection. The inspector, equipped with an official card, makes the purchase as an ordinary customer – without revealing his identity. Only if an irregularity is detected, such as a failure to issue a receipt, does he show his official ID card and begin the formal part of the check.
A detailed protocol is drawn up for each such activity. It must contain a number of elements: from the inspector’s authorisation number, to the details of the controlled entity, to the details of the purchase and the receipt information. In July 2022, an electronic Check Purchase Register was introduced in the ZISAR Plus system, making the documentation of inspections much more efficient.
An interesting aspect of the check acquisition system is the possibility of immediate seizure of goods if they constitute evidence of a crime. In the Śląskie and Wielkopolskie Voivodships, 12 such seizures were made in the period under review. Most frequently, they concerned e-cigarette accessories and dried tobacco without excise duty and counterfeit perfumes.
The system also responds to signals from citizens via the KAS National Intervention Call Centre. After receiving a notification, the office has only five working days to carry out an inspection. As the NIK audit showed, this deadline is not always met – in an extreme case, the delay in the tax office in Rybnik was as long as 194 days.
Effectiveness of check acquisitions
The effectiveness of the system is best illustrated by the numbers. In the Śląskie and Wielkopolskie Voivodeships, fines amounting to PLN 2 million were imposed in 2022, of which as much as 94.7% were enforced by the end of July 2023. Nationwide, 56.5 thousand inspections were carried out in 2022, which resulted in the imposition of 13.5 thousand fines for a total amount of PLN 18.2 million.
However, the NIK audit revealed some shortcomings in the functioning of the system. These mainly concern formal shortcomings – missing elements in protocols, incorrect documentation of activities or lack of specified limits of funds in control orders. However, this does not detract from the effectiveness of the tool itself, which has proved to be an effective way of combating the grey market.
It is worth noting that the system of check acquisitions is constantly being developed and improved. This is evidenced not only by the increasing number of service cards issued, but also by the introduction of new technical solutions, such as the aforementioned electronic register. This shows that the tax administration is serious about sealing the tax system using modern tools and procedures.
Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.
The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.
Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.
He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.
Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.
He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.
