At the end of January, the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) in Berlin regularly issues an update on the progress of the „Electronic balance sheet“. As 2014 was the first year in which the electronic submission of the officially required data set became mandatory for many companies, the focus that year was on the experience already gained in submitting e-balance sheets.

E-balance sheets are on the rise

The number of e-balance sheets submitted for the 2013 financial year totalled 1,006,869, the majority of which were submitted in the last two months of 2014. The project has thus demonstrated its suitability for large-scale implementation. However, representatives from the tax offices criticised the fact that many filers opted for the „minimum strategy“ and thus only provided the authorities with the data that was strictly required. “Based on the feedback received so far, the volume of data in e-balance sheets has, for the most part, decreased compared with paper-based submissions.” The recipients of the data expressed satisfaction with the tax authorities’ newly introduced risk management system, which enables high-risk cases to be filtered out using e-balance sheet data and leads to prompt tax audits.

Improving data quality and increasing the volume of data is therefore in the interests of the business owner and their tax adviser, in order to reduce the risk of a request for additional information. Representatives of the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) made the following appeal to the audience: „What was submitted in the paper-based system should also be submitted now.“ This refers to the voluntary components of the e-balance sheet: account statements, fixed asset schedules and a list of fixed assets. Mandatory fields for the fixed asset schedule have been announced for Taxonomy Version 5.5.

Electronic submission will become mandatory

The electronic submission of special and supplementary balance sheets as separate data sets for financial years ending before 1 January 2015 will become mandatory. In Taxonomy 5.4, additions were made specifically for this type of tax balance sheet and discussed in detail. Furthermore, a text entry for the fixed assets register has been added so that, in future, this footnote can be positioned precisely within the fixed assets register.

The event focused on changes relating to quality assurance, footnotes and the Technical Guide. In the GAAP section, the standard labels and short labels were revised and a new „Short Label-60“ (max. 60 characters) was introduced

In addition to the Excel visualisations, a web-based visualisation of the taxonomies is now available at www.esteuer.de made available online.