Accounting Intelligence

Upon completion of the annual financial statements, all companies start to think about where to keep the "no-longer-needed" invoices, bank and petty cash statements and other accounting documents of the recently closed business year whose volume may be greater or smaller, depending on the size of the company. Several laws address the obligation of companies to retain documents. This newsletter is intended to provide a brief overview of the issue.

The first thing that comes to the mind of an accountant when thinking of May is the obligation of disclosing financial statements but we must remember that the timely disclosure of financial statements is in fact a matter of high importance for enterprises and not for accountants. In this issue of our newsletter we present to you the consequences of not disclosing financial statements by the prescribed deadline for companies.

The modifications of the Act on Accounting defined in Act CXXIII of 2010 are applicable first for the business year starting in 2011, however, companies may choose to apply the new regulations for the business year starting in 2010 already. A major theme of the modifications is that the legislator started to move towards simplification: the possibility of preparing simplified annual reports was extended, which will bring a significant relief from administration burdens for many enterprises as they will not have to prepare their annual reports with a much larger content of data.

Although dividend payments to non private individual owners are not subject to taxes since January 1, 2006, the complexity of the regulations governing the taxation of dividend payments to private individuals is second only to the diversity of the payout solutions private individual shareholders bring to the desk of their accountants. It is therefore worthwhile to review the various advance payment and payout methods, their accounting and tax implications. In the opinion of our Partner, Monika Marczin, a well prepared accountant can save his or her clients some awkward surprises by giving them proper information in time prior to the payout.