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Portugal was the first country to introduce Standard Audit File for Tax (SAF-T) on 1 January 2008.
Initially, there was a requirement for VAT registered businesses to be able to extract and submit a SAF-T file to the tax authorities.
In 2013, this was extended to resident tax payers being required to submit to the Portuguese tax website monthly in SAF-T format:
Submissions must be completed with the normal VAT return by the 20th of the month following. Non-resident VAT registered businesses are exempted from Portuguese SAF-T requirements.
In 2015, a new digital signature invoice approval system, E-Factura, was introduced for the approval of invoices with NIF numbers. Companies providing SAF-T submissions are not required to comply with this new system.
SAF-T is an electronic schema developed for the efficient exchange of information between the tax authorities and businesses. It was created by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2005 as a standard to be used globally to ensure consistency from country-to-country to facilitate exchange of data between tax authorities. The file requirements are expressed using XML, although the EU does not specify the exact file format.
There are generally five reporting requirements:
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