SAF-T UA - Detailed Technical Description of Elements was published

The State Tax Service of Ukraine has published on its official website the Detailed Technical Description Elements of SAF-T UA and its Annex.

The technical description of the elements of the standard audit file (SAF-T UA) is intended for taxpayers who are going to export data from the source accounting system in accordance with the requirements for the standard audit file.

The Detailed Technical Description Elements of SAF-T UA elements consists of the following sections:

• "General information", which discloses the purpose of the document, current regulatory framework, and definitions used in the document;
• "Purpose and Objective of Creating an XSD for SAF-T UA", which contains general information on the standard audit file, in particular:
  • rules for forming the file name;
  • information on file size limits;
  • approaches to creating SAF-T UA data files.
• "Detailed description of the structure elements with reference to the XSD schema" which includes, among other:
  • rules for displaying certain file elements (date, IBAN, etc.);
  • explanation of the structure of the table describing the elements of SAF-T UA;
  • description of the information included in the sections "Header", "Reference books", "Accounting transactions", "Information on documentary support of accounting records", as well as their subsections.

A detailed technical description of the SAF-T UA elements is provided in Annex 2 to the published document.

It is unclear whether the current version of the Detailed Technical Description of SAF-T UA elements will be amended in the future. However, this document will already help taxpayers prepare a standard audit file.

We remind you that large taxpayers are required to provide SAF-T UA at the request of the tax authority within the documentary audit.

Furthermore, according to the draft law No. 6255 dated 02.11.2021, it is expected that SAF-T UA will become a regular annual tax reporting for large taxpayers from 2025 and for all VAT payers from 2027. The draft law also provides for penalties for failure to submit SAF-T UA.

Due to the fact that SAF-T UA contains a large amount of data on all company transactions for the relevant period, we recommend starting analysing the data in the accounting system for its sufficiency and preparing SAF-T UA now. The PwC Ukraine team is already supporting several clients in preparing for the submission of information in the SAF-T UA format. Based on our experience both in Ukraine and in other countries, we would like to warn you that the preparation process is long and painstaking and requires a lot of effort on the part of project teams. Therefore, we recommend preparing for the implementation of SAF-T UA reporting in advance.