On April 18, 2019 there entered into force the Polish Act of November 9, 2018 on electronic invoices in public procurement, concessions for construction works or services and public-private partnership (Journal of Laws 2018 item 2191 ). This Act implements Directive 2014/55/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 April 2014 on invoicing electronic in public procurement (Journal of the EU L 133 of 06/05/2014, page 1). The Directive, in its recitals, indicates above all that “The multiplicity of non-interoperable standards results in excessive complexity, legal uncertainty and additional operating costs for economic operators using electronic invoices across Member States”. The above problems may become more serious in the future due to the spread of electronic invoices. Therefore, one of the goals of introducing the above changes is to introduce interoperability, i.e. to allow the presentation and processing of information in a consistent manner between business systems, regardless of the technologies, applications or platforms they use. Under the new Act, an ICT system was created for which the minister in charge of the economy is responsible – the Electronic Invoicing Platform www.efaktura.gov.pl.
This platform allows sending structured electronic invoices and other structured electronic documents via its intermediary, as well as using an ICT system operated by OpenPEPPOL (an international association whose primary objective is to provide European entrepreneurs with electronic communication with European public sector entities).
The new platform offers the following services: ordering delivery, notification of delivery, acknowledgment of receipt, invoicing, issuing a correcting invoice, issuing an accounting note, generating reports and summaries. Contractors are not obliged to send structured electronic invoices via the platform (Article 4 paragraph 2 of the Act) – but if they issue and send such an invoice, the orderer is obliged to collect it (Article 4 paragraph 1 of the Act). This means that the contracting entities are required to have an account on the platform and must set up such an account before the expected date of receipt of the first invoice of this type, i.e. from the entry into force of the law on electronic invoicing.