On 18 February 2020, the European Council adopted a package of legislative measures which will require payment service providers of Member States to send information on cross-border payments initiated by Member States, as well as on the beneficiary/payee of these cross-border payments. In the context of this new set of legislative measures, payment service providers providing payment services in the EU should monitor the beneficiaries of cross-border payments and send information on those receiving more than 25 cross-border payments per quarter to the Member States’ tax administrations.

This information will be centralized in a European database, the Central Electronic System of Payments information (“CESOP”), where it will be stored, merged and cross-referenced with data from other European databases. All the information that will be stored in the CESOP will then be made available to the experts of the Member States’ tax administrations dealing with the fight against VAT fraud, through a network called EUROFISC.

The purpose of this new measure is to give the Member States’ tax authorities the appropriate tools to detect possible VAT fraud in e-commerce, by sellers/suppliers established in another Member State or in a third country.

The new measure respects personal data protection rules. Only information related to payments that may be related to economic activity is transmitted to tax administrations. Information about consumers and the reason for the payment is not transmitted.

The new rules will come into effect on January 1, 2024, and the first payment data submission by payment service providers to the competent national authority (IAPR) will be made by April 30, 2024 and will concern the first quarter of 2024.

The deadline for the 1st quarter 2024 CESOP filing, has been extended until May 2, 2024 (Decision A.1071/2024, Official Gov. Gazette Β΄ 2551)