From 1.1.2021 an amendment to the Accounting Act began to apply new rules for the publication of financial statements. Let us briefly summarize these new requirements.
Until now, it has been possible to publish financial statements in the following ways:
- via data box,
- by e-mail to the mailbox of the Commercial Register,
- or via the justice.cz on-line portal.
Under this amendment to the Accounting Act, it is possible from 1.1.2021 to meet the obligation to publish financial statements through the tax administrator as part of the filing of a tax return, one annex of which consists of the financial statements. The tax administrator must then submit those financial statements to the register court in electronic form without undue delay. This streamlines communication between public administration systems, as two previous steps (filing an income tax return and sending financial statements to the Collection of Documents) are now replaced by one filing.
Who can use this new method of publication?
Not all accounting entities can make use of this new option, but only business corporations. Entities submitting an annual report to the Czech National Bank pursuant to a special legal regulation (Section 21b of the Accounting Act) are also excluded from the group of eligible entities.
A separate group is represented by audited companies for whom the publication of financial statements through the tax administrator is in practice impossible. Section 21b of the Accounting Act clearly states that the transmitted documents may only be financial statements, not annual reports. Thus if financial statements form part of the annual report, the tax administrator cannot be used to publish them having regard to Section 9(3) of the Tax Code. This provision states that the tax administrator may process data if they are necessary for tax administration, and only to the extent necessary to achieve the objective of tax administration.
It may therefore be concluded that the new rules for the publication of financial statements will be used mainly by micro and small accounting entities, which are business corporations and do not need to have their financial statement audited.
