Our clients deal with tax authority officials during inspections and other tax authority procedures. We aim to ensure that dialogues and procedures with the tax authority end in the most satisfactory manner for companies.
Who can benefit from client representation at the NAV?
Companies are generally represented by their senior executives in the various procedures, and the same applies for tax matters at the NAV. The company representation method is always clearly stated in the certificate of incorporation: a person entitled to represent the company can act independently, but often the joint approval of more than one representative is necessary for any given decision.
In practice, this frequently means a very complicated authorisation procedure, particularly in the case of joint signature rights of several managing directors, so most of the time (and this applies for foreign VAT-registered companies too) companies engage employees of legal age as well as lawyers, tax consultants, tax experts, accountants, auditors or an employee of an business organisation authorised to perform accounting, bookkeeping or tax consultancy activities to manage their tax affairs. So client representation at the NAV generally means permanently engaging or authorising an external firm performing bookkeeping and tax consultancy activities.
Authorising a tax consultant simplifies life in terms of fulfilling domestic tax liabilities as well as in grasping and evaluating the company’s tax situation. If there is a problem, the authorised representative can contact the competent tax authority administrator directly through the NAV’s call centre, following prior agreement with the client. This is particularly important for VAT-registered taxpayers, where the most “visible” sign of their economic presence in Hungary is a domestic tax number, and they have no employees of their own who can carry out these administrative tasks in Hungarian.
Client representation at the NAV can offer solutions for our clients in the following areas:
- Permanent authorisation: with this type of representation right we help our clients with all matters, and can also advocate their interests during tax inspections (preparing observations).
- ad-hoc authorisation for tax authority resolutions means we can provide appropriate professional support and evidence to argue against adverse findings from the tax authority.
- Forwarding tax returns through the government portal: the registered, authorised and permanent representative can submit the company’s tax returns and other forms for the NAV online, through the government portal. Data on forwarded forms can subsequently be queried online as well.
- Queries of master data and tax current account information: additionally, and at any time, the authorised representative can query the master data of the represented company, the detailed company data reported to the NAV, it can receive information on the frequency of tax returns to be submitted by the company and on whether the company qualifies as a reliable or risky taxpayer based on the automatic quarterly rating by the tax authority in Hungary.
