The National Tax and Customs Authority (NAV) has launched a pilot project for introduction of the Standard Audit File (“SAF-T”) in order to support data provision to facilitate more efficient tax audits and the automated processing of data.

SAF-T is a data pool of XML files that contains data from ERP systems that NAV usually requests from taxpayers during a tax audit. SAF-T includes master and transaction data such as ledger data, information in connection with the outgoing and incoming invoices, payments, stock movements, and tangible assets, for a specific financial or reporting period.

As it is currently envisaged, SAF-T, which could be introduced on 1 January 2021, would support the unified data provision during tax audits, primarily on a voluntary and ad hoc basis.

The concept of SAF-T was developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and has already been introduced in several EU member states. Considering their experiences and the specifics of domestic regulation, NAV has recently developed and published a proposal for the data structure of SAF-T in Hungary.

The pilot project, in which KPMG is also involved, serves to finalize the Hungarian version, data structure of SAF-T, and to obtain views on its implementation.

For any questions that may arise regarding this topic, we are glad to discuss it with and/or assist our clients.