Bulgarian Industrial Capital Association (BICA) wants a predictable and in line with global trends e-commerce environment. This is the only way Bulgarian companies will be competitive. This became clear during the round table held by the NRA on “E-commerce in Bulgaria – prospects and opportunities. Fiscal and consumer aspects.

“It is important for us to enable online, software fiscalization through direct access of commercial software to NRA servers or trusted independent intermediaries. This alternative form of fiscalization should be defined so that it is accessible to all companies engaged in e-commerce, including those that also perform manufacturing or physical trade, “said Pasko Paskov, an expert at BICA, a member of the working group on software fiscalization to the National Revenue Agency and manager of Step-Soft Alliance EOOD. “E-commerce is becoming a major trading channel for more and more companies, and any regulations for it should put Bulgarian business in a competitive advantage, not at a disadvantage.”

According to BICA, an increasing share of the trade turnover of the business goes through e-commerce and the NRA needs to work to improve the environment by enabling Bulgarian business to be competitive. The solution is to build a predictable and in line with the latest trends in trade environment, which allows the use of electronic money, cryptocurrencies and other means of payment, which gradually displace cash.

According to Pasko Paskov, all this should happen in a regime of transparency and dialogue in order to avoid the bad practices and lost time in the last two years, which happened with the changes in Ordinance H-18. If our country fails to create a good environment, BICA expects part of the trade turnover of the companies to switch to using foreign platforms such as Amazon and Alibaba. This in turn will lead to extremely great difficulties in tracking turnover and correspondingly very low levels of tax collection.

During the round table, the NRA decided to continue the work of the working group for software fiscalization. The Executive Director of the Revenue Agency gave a mandate to form the group and start work on defining a fiscalization regime for online trade. The group should make a proposal by the end of January 2021 for guidelines for change so as to facilitate the work of online merchants without increasing the risk for the fiscal.

Software fiscalization is the exchange of electronic fiscal documents through a secure channel to the National Revenue Agency (see chart) and ensures that the customer will receive an email receipt (2) for their purchase only after the NRA has received and certified its fiscalization (1).

Among the topics that were discussed at the online event were also the trends and problems encountered by the NRA in collecting in e-commerce.