Infothek

Discussion on mandatory B2B e-invoicing in Germany as early as 2025

In the joint FNFE/AWV workshop in Strasbourg on April 20th/21st 2023, "Vat in the Digital Age", ViDA, was a topic and Jenny Herzfeld mentioned that Germany had already requested Art. 395 MwStSystRL permission to introduced mandatory B2B-e-invoicing in November 2022, and that the expected "discussion proposal" (Diskussionsvorschlag) for the introduction in January 2025 had arrived on Tuesday, April 18th, 2023.

This is backed by the fact that a local chamber of commerce has published identical information with the detailled changes suggested for the Umsatzsteuergesetz.

Previously there had already been a (german) paper how the Italian approach on e-invocing could also be applied on Germany, the Federal Audit Office (Bundesrechnungshof) mentioned it, the Scientific Service of the Bundestag investigated and a political party even requested mandatory B2B invoicing in Germany. In the 2021 coalition treaty to form the newly elected German government the parties agreed to introduce a Continuous Transaction Control system (CTC) (Umsatzsteuermeldesystem). 

Update 2023-05-23: Replaced two now broken original links with working ones from archive.org