Slovakia bank account Whitelist has been published

In order to combat tax fraud, the Slovakian Tax Administration has introduced a rule that all VAT registered subjects need to provide data on the bank accounts they use for business. Payment on invoices between taxable persons can only be made into registered bank accounts whose list is published by the Slovakian Tax Authority.

The so-called, Whitelist of approved bank accounts has been published and is available for every taxpayer in order to verify the validity of bank accounts before making invoice payments. The list is available on the Slovakian Tax Authority’s (Finančná správa) website.

This list is updated daily. Therefore, every VAT payer has to inform the government as soon as possible in case of any change in their bank accounts, for example, the creation of a new account or the deletion of the existing account. In cases where the notification obligation is not fulfilled, or if the taxpayer’s bank accounts are not in the published list, the taxpayer will not be paid any excess deductions or VAT, and a fine of up to 10,000 Euros may be imposed.

There are three ways to verify the bank accounts of companies:

• First, the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic published a tool on their website that VAT-payers can manually find the bank account they want to reach easily. 
• Second, it is different from the manual searching the list of the registered taxpayers published in an XML format called ”Flat File” and suitable for use in mass verification of the alignment with the bank accounts.
• The last method is Open Data Portal which is a web service and developed by the Finance administration. The system provides convenience to access a number of third-party programs.