Fee forms 281.50 require to be filed on or before 29 June of the year following the calendar year during which charges and/or attributions relating to commissions, fees, trade discounts, allowances or fringe benefits, … were made.
If the above-mentioned charges and/or attributions are not properly reported on these forms in due time, the taxpayer can be liable to a special levy in the sum of 100% or 50% (in case the beneficiary is subject to corporate income tax) of the unreported costs/benefit in kind, unless:
- the taxpayer would be able to provide evidence that the income in question has been declared in a duly submitted tax return; or
- the taxpayer unambiguously identifies the beneficiary within a period of 2 years and 6 months after 1 January of the assessment year concerned. The Constitutional Court ruled in its judgement of 26 September 2019 made some remarks on the latter point.
Automation
The preparation of these forms is often a time consuming, repetitive and burdensome exercise with room for errors.
Since the required data is often already available in the company’s ERP system, it is a matter of finding a way to isolate and report the relevant transactions.
PwC has been building a tool that – once tailored to the specific needs of the company’s ERP system – is able to use specific data points to extract the relevant transactions from the source ERP data in order to report these on the fee forms 281.50.
Once the process has been established and in a stable ERP environment, it is a matter of loading the ERP data and carrying out logical checks in subsequent years.
The advantage of using such an automated process/tool is huge in terms of traceability, error rate, data management, data quality, verifiability, etc.
Change in filing procedure
Finally, we draw your attention to changes to the filing process. Indeed, the online service of the Belgian tax authorities is currently undergoing several changes that will have a major impact on the future operations of the company as well as on the mandatory electronic submission of fee forms 281.50 via the MyMinfin platform. For now, be aware that -in order to ensure the filing via Belcotax-on-web- an internal mandate must be created via the e-Gov role management if you want to file the fee forms yourself.
As always, please feel free to get in touch with your regular contact person to discuss the above. He/she will be happy to support you or refer you to one of our specialists if needed.
