laws
taxes
business

What does the Tax Office see about you?

July 3, 2020
Natalia Gorpinchenko
Accountex Accounting
What does the Tax and Customs Board (MTA) see about your company? What factors influence MTA's decision to conduct an audit of your business? Have you already used the new MTA electronic service for assessing tax behavior? Starting from Monday, you can view your company through the lens of the tax authorities.  

To take advantage of this, don't forget to grant user access rights for using the assessment service. The service consolidates both public data about your company and estimates based on tax-protected information.  

The tax compliance assessment reflects how timely and accurately your company fulfills its statutory obligations. The assessments and their indicators are displayed as numerical values on a scale from 1 to 3, with color coding.  

What is particularly interesting is that the assessment is influenced by the risk of under-the-table payments (envelope wages). To calculate this, the declared employee wages are compared to the Estonian average wages for similar positions. According to May data, this was one of the most common issues.  

Additionally, the assessment is affected by factors such as the background of responsible persons, unpaid tax debts, unfiled declarations, and missing notes about company-owned vehicles being used solely for official trips.  

Certainly, if issues are identified, they can be corrected. This way, you can prevent potential tax audits. Clearly, if significant deficiencies are found over a long period based on these assessments, it may lead to contact from the tax authorities.  

You can also use this service when choosing a partner. Some data is publicly available for all companies—such as address, paid taxes, number of employees, debts, and various permits.  

Check what the assessment says about your company—perhaps there’s something that needs your attention already today?