1 January 2024 Romania: e-Invoice and mandatory elements of an invoice

If you are a company resident in Romania or a non-resident entity registered for VAT purposes in Romania, then you can be subject to RO e-Invoice from 1 January 2024, if the transactions you perform have as place of delivery our country, Romania.

Thus, it becomes mandatory to use the national RO e-Invoice system, both for sending invoices issued to your customers and for downloading the invoices you receive, also through this system, from your suppliers.

In order to find ourselves prepared, we conducted simulations in issuing and downloading invoices through the national e-Invoice system and discovered that, at the moment, this system does not meet all the requirements in terms of the mandatory elements that, by law, must appear on an invoice.

Thus, according to:

• 319, para. 20 of Law 227/2015 on the Fiscal Code,) and
• 74 Law 31/1990 (the Companies Act)
• General rules for the preparation and use of financial-accounting documents of 5 November 2015, integral part of OMFP 2634/2015

the information that the invoices issued must contain are:

• identification data of the supplier/provider (name, address, tax code, share capital);
• identification data of the beneficiary (name, address, tax code);
• series, number and date of issue of the invoice;
• date of delivery of goods or provision of services;
• name and quantity of goods delivered/services rendered;
• unit price, taxable value, any rebates, discounts, returns and other price reductions;
• applicable VAT rate, VAT amount collected expressed in lei;
• information on applicable exemptions (294 par. (2) lit. a) Fiscal Code for intra-Community supplies of goods; 278 par. (2) of the Fiscal Code for intra-Community supplies of services; art. 294, para. 1 lit. a) of the Fiscal Code for export of goods);
• other terms such as “self-billing”, “reverse charge”, “VAT on receipt”;
• reference to other previous invoices or documents when several invoices/documents are issued for the same transaction.

For some of the items listed above, if they were not shown on the invoice, there is so far a risk of being fined by ANAF (National Tax Administration Agency). From 1 January 2024, ANAF provides us with an e-Invoice system in which not all the fields are present to allow you to enter all the mandatory elements in an invoice, such as the supplier’s share capital, its registration code with the Trade Register, the full address of both the customer and the supplier, the customer’s registration code with the Trade Register, etc.

Under Registration Number still the Unique Registration Code appears, the number that shows up in the VAT identifier field.

Being a system provided by the Authority that controls us, we would be tempted to say that those items, for which there is no possibility to be included in the e-invoice, are no longer mandatory or at least will no longer be grounds for fines. The principle of prudence, however, leads me to invite you to make your own verifications both in issuing invoices and in downloading invoices from suppliers in the e-Invoice system and in case of non-compliance to write to the ANAF for explanations or for exemption.

We have done so and are waiting for a reply from ANAF. We will come back as soon as we have news.