Following the provisions of Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/965, the technical specifications (XML Schema Definition – XSD) for the standard form that taxpayers or their intermediaries may use to submit records requested pursuant to Article 47i of Regulation (EU) No 904/2010 have been published and are available on the OSS web portal (see links hereunder).
The content of records which should be kept by the taxable person is laid out in Council Regulation 282/2011 (Article 63c). This includes general information such as the Member State of consumption of the supply, the type of supply, the date of the supply and the VAT payable, but also more specific information, such as details of any payments on account and information used to determine the place where the customer is established, has his permanent address or usually resides.
These records must be kept for 10 years from the end of the year in which the transaction was made, regardless of whether the taxable person has stopped using the scheme or not.
These records have to be made electronically available, on request, to the Member State of identification or any Member State of consumption without delay. To obtain the records held by a taxable person or intermediary, the Member State of consumption first has to make a request to the Member State of identification. That Member State will provide information on how this is to be done in practical terms when the records are requested from the taxable person/intermediary.
The OSS Standard Audit file (SAF-OSS) can be used by a trader who is then assured that the file containing his records will be accepted by all Member States: SAF-OSS
Source
- European Commission: VAT – One Stop Shop
- European Commission: Record Keeping and Audits in OSS under the question: ‘How does the taxable person/intermediary make these records available to the tax authority?
