Dispatch No. 4144/TCT-CS dated October 28th, 2021 of the General Department of Taxation regarding introduction of new regulations of the Circular No. 78/2021/TT-BTC dated September 17, 2021 providing guidelines on invoices and records

These are the new important contents relating to electronic invoices (e-invoices) of Circular No. 78/2021/TT-BTC already reviewed by the General Department of Taxation:

1. Addition of conditions on authorization to issue e-invoices (Article 3 of Circular No. 78). Accordingly, an enterprise is only allowed to authorize a related party under Decree No. 132/2020/ND-CP to issue e-invoices and must register/notify tax authority of authorized information.

2. Adjustment to e-invoice symbol (Article 4 of Circular No. 78). Accordingly, the first character of reference number of an e-invoice is C or K, distinguishing the difference between the invoice bearing a tax authority’s authentication code (C) and invoice not bearing a tax authority’s authentication code (K);

3. Providing guidelines in details on procedures for conversing unauthenticated e-invoices into authenticated e-invoices (Article 5 of Circular No. 78). Accordingly, upon the conversion, enterprises have to register the modification of information about the e-invoices as prescribed in Article 15 of Decree No. 123/2020/ND-CP.

4. Enterprises with high tax risk are required to transfer to use authenticated e-invoices within 10 working days from the receipt of the tax authority’s notice and after at least 12 months, the enterprises are allowed to register to use the unauthenticated e-invoices again.

5. In case of using unauthenticated e-invoices, after transferring the e-invoices to buyer, the seller shall concurrently transfer data on such unauthenticated e-invoices to the tax authority within the same day.

6. The handling of errors in e-invoices has these differences: For the first handling, to comply with Article 19 of Decree No. 123/2020/ND-CP. For the second handling of errors (invoices are still erroneous after the first handling), to comply with Article 7 of Circular No. 78/2021/TT-BTC .

7. Addition of conditions for use of e-invoices generated from POS cash registers (Article 8 of Circular No. 78). Accordingly, e-invoices generated from POS cash registers must apply the invoices bearing codes of tax authorities.