Fiscalisation system used in Albania was based on older version of Fiscalisation devices that did not have capability of real time reporting. System installed in 2009 are not cost effective for both taxpayers and government and are based on technologies that were available at the time of implementation, but that are not up to standards used in most EU countries that implemented similar solutions recently.
For effective tax inspection, for citizens to be able to verify on the spot if invoice is being reported properly to tax department and for purposes of tax analysis a real time invoice reporting has many advantages compared to the sending of daily revenue summary or just monthly report.
New system will enable each citizen to verify immediately after invoice is being issued is the invoice reported to the central tax system. This process is done by scanning unique QR code of an invoice on your smartphone and sending it through the internet to the tax department. Once tax department receives the unique code, it will reply with confirmation if unique code exists in the database and with details of the invoice that is associated with it. This verification enables citizen to confirm that taxes are being properly reported for an invoice that was issued to him. This process enhances transparency in doing business and facilitates government in reducing grey economy since it is easier to detect fraudulent or non-reported invoices.
From a perspective of tax department, new system will enable central analytics capability that can create risk based tax inspection approach. This means that suspicious behaviour will be easier to identify and that based on this analytics tax inspection is more likely to visit more suspicious taxpayers than to go for a random checks and to visit taxpayers that are compliant with the law. This in time creates less business burden for all taxpayers that are issuing all the invoices and are operating according to the law, since it is less likely they will be selected for tax inspection.
Technology change is necessary since current devices were based on 2G/3G technologies that are slowly being replaced in Europe with newer network technologies. To ensure that there is no technology lock, new process is not based on proprietary technologies (e.g. specific HW or SW devices) but on open standards and support modern internet connectivity.
This technology approach means that Fiscalisation is software based and process can be easily implemented on all existing software POS machines (without the need to have secondary HW just for fiscalisation). This approach lowers technology costs in the long term for all taxpayers.