France: less than a year to fiscalization

As announced in December 2015 in our News article “FRANCE- Certified POS in 2018”, it’s a lot close now for the VAT payers in France who will be obliged to use only secure and certified POS software and cash registers, starting from January 2018.

BOI-TVA-DECLA-30-10-30-20160803, the regulation which specifies certification rules is published in August 2016. Requirements must confirm data irrevocability, security, storage and archiving which are the basic rules for the certification process.

The accounting software or the cash register system must record all transactions. It must preserve all recorded data and make it unchangeable. Consequently, cancellations or modifications during a transaction must be recorded as well, since there is a possibility to switch from registration mode to training mode, transaction in training mode must be logged like all the others. The receipts must then emphasize that receipt was issued in training mode.

Data security does not allow erasing journal memory and modifying the stock accordingly. The accounting software or the cash register system must secure the original recorded sale data or recorded modifications. This security can be ensured by any reliable technical process. It may in particular be a technique of chaining records or electronic signature of data.

The accounting software or the cash register system which records all transactions must provide report function. This report must take place after defined minimum period of time. For each closing – daily, monthly and yearly (or by fiscal year) – before deleting data, system must calculate cumulative data and stored it securely in the system. Retention period must be at least 6 years.  The accounting software or the cash register system must enable the archiving of storage (journal) data. Archives may be kept in the system itself or outside the system where available. The archives must be readable, even without the original system. The archives must be available to the tax administration in the event of inspection, including cases when the taxpayer has changed software or system (thus must be preserved separatly). In case of a centralized system with several sale data sources (several points of sale), each point of sale should be traceable individually.

Each software or cash register must be certified by a body accredited by COFRAC (French Committee on Accreditation). Taxpayer can obtain certificate of conformity from POS or cash register supplier.

Although there is less than one year left, a number of accredited bodies is still small. Some certificates are already obtained based on procedure NF525, which was adopted by the French association of suppliers and manufacturers of cash register systems and software applications. The National Laboratory of Metrology and Testing (LNE) is involved also in the whole process and has prepared a pretty good guideline for the certification procedure. Some sources estimate that 50-70% of current cash register systems will not be compliant and will need to be replaced.

Inspection of the certified systems will be carried out by the tax inspectors and the lack of a certificate or attestation sanctioned by a fine of € 7,500, renewable every 30 days after the certificate was provided.