the new electronic invoice does not solve late payments or delinquency

2023-06-05 14:54:28

“It is essential to carefully design the implementation and information systems of the electronic invoice” in order to facilitate control and compliance with payment deadlines and avoid late payment, as well as “help measures to achieve simple operation in companies and freelancers. This is one of the main claims that the Spanish Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises (Cepyme) has presented to the Ministry of Economic Affairs with the Default Observatory to the Director General of Economic Policy of the Ministry, Elena Aparici, who transferred the lines of regulatory development of the electronic invoice included in the Create and Grow Law.

The business representatives stated that there are “weaknesses” that the upcoming implementation of electronic invoicing will not solve on its own, such as the unequal bargaining power of companies according to their size -with special incidence in smaller companies and the self-employed-, the delinquency of the public sector with SMEs and those related to data protection or the adaptation period that SMEs will have to go through, among others. It has been the president of the Observatory, Luis Collado, in charge of transferring these “concerns” that they have about its implementation, upon detecting many “weaknesses” in the Law, which does not solve by itself the next implementation of the electronic invoice. For this reason, the Observatory has requested that the revision of the European directive to combat late payment be expedited, as well as that a maximum payment period be defined by companies and, above all, by Public Administrations, in addition to returning to demand that public contracts be updated in relation to the rise in costs. For this employer, it is essential that issues such as how to account for delinquency and its start date are specified in order to “homogenize the criteria and provide more certainty.”

The employers’ association of SMEs also puts on alert that the call for general elections for next July 23 may put a “brake” on the priorities established for the Spanish Presidency of the European Council, on which it urges “accelerate the processing” of this norm and try to complete it before the elections to the European Parliament. “It is necessary to settle the delinquency of the Public Administrations and prevent aid to sectors most in need, such as facilities for the gas-intensive industry, from directly or indirectly translating into increases in delinquency.”