Although the Create and Grow Act has been the focus of debate over its contents for many weeks, and where its benefits have been outlined, there are now some discordant voices with the regulations. This is the case of CONETIC, which asserts that the necessity to utilize the electronic invoice in business transactions with the self-employed, would result in an unaffordable additional charge for SMEs and the self-employed.
This indication is led by the First Vice President and Minister of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calvino.
The entity claims that no public or free platform is being considered for allowing companies and freelancers to utilize other communication methods in their electronic invoices, as they already do with FACE or FACEB2B, that allows them to comply with the new standard without additional costs directly and without messaging intermediaries.
CONETIC has asked the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation to convene a consultation on digital transformation to the Regulation. It expresses that businesses and the self-employed may use a public and free platform for the delivery and receipt of electronic invoices, and that it is not required to engage a private courier company for intermediation.
"A regulation must be enacted in Italy, where electronic invoices are exchanged on a public platform, free of charge, with a single delivery method, regardless of the type of recipient customer, whether it is a public entity, a private corporation, or a person physical," according to Vincent Alciturri, CONETIC's vice president.
The average cost of issuing electronic invoices for businesses is about 300 euros per year, including additional services, according to private electronic invoice providers. This cost is significantly lower than issuing paper invoices, although more costly than using a free public platform.
This minor cost per invoice, taking into account the number of companies and self-employed workers in Spain, which includes more than 3.4 million of the former and 3.3 million of the latter, represents a total cost of intermediation of about 1,000 million per year.
In 2021, 296 million electronic invoices were exchanged in the B2B industry and 14 million in the B2G sector. Only those with a value greater than 5,000 euros are required, as of January 31 of this year, were 92,131,806.
“The introduction of electronic invoices for all kinds of recipients in Spain is a unique opportunity for the transformation and simplification of business and administration processes, but it requires leadership that includes integrated approaches and avoids isolated initiatives of scope partial,” says Tomás Castro, President of CONETIC.
If the obligation for businesses and the self-employed to contract with private courier companies is approved, the delivery of their invoices would involve you incurring unnecessary costs and also executing inefficient management procedures, as a result of two different invoice delivery methods: FACE if the invoice is public or another platform if it is private. Nor would the tax agency's proposed administrative reduction ensure that tax reports such as the SII are eliminated and that the Tax Agency collects this data from electronic invoices already delivered to a public platform.
The cost of issuing invoices should be surpassed by the loss of control of the organization over the information contained in each electronic invoice, which these individuals may have access to, as part of CONETIC. “Our business and tax data would be in the hands of third parties, and the law would not provide for their protection,” says Ray Fernández, a member of CONETIC.
In this sense, he urges the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation to take a break in the draft of the Regulation and to compare its merits with those already implemented.
