The Law on Accounting (Official Gazette of the RS, No. 73/2019 and 44/2021) (“Law”) stipulates the obligation for legal entities and entrepreneurs that did not have business events in the reporting year, nor did they have data on assets in the business books for that year, to submit a Statement of Inactivity (“Statement”) for that reporting year by 31 March of the following year at the latest.
In this regard, all legal entities and entrepreneurs which were not active in 2021 are obliged to submit the Statement for 2021 by 31 March 2022 at the latest. In practice, these can be the so-called “shell companies” that do not have business activities because they serve for some future business activities, but also all other companies, associations, cooperatives, entrepreneurs, etc. that were not active in 2021 for whichever reason.
The Law treats the failure to submit the Statement as an economic offense, with the threat of the following fines:
- RSD 100,000 to RSD 3,000,000 for a legal entity;
- RSD 20,000 to RSD 150,000 for the responsible person in a legal entity.
Proceedings before commercial courts in the Republic of Serbia, which are conducted to prosecute entrepreneurs, legal entities and responsible persons in these legal entities for having failed to submit the Statement, are very numerous in practice, which we assume to be due to the unawareness of this obligation.
In addition, the fact that a legal entity has been deleted from the register of the Business Registers Agency (“BRA”) in the meantime does not exclude further prosecution of the responsible person in that legal entity if this economic offense was committed during the period when the legal entity was registered.
The Statement is submitted to the BRA in electronic form, signed by a qualified electronic signature of the legal representative, with the obligation to pay a fee for processing the Statement and making it public. We draw your attention to the fact that the Statement is submitted to the BRA through the information system (the so-called PIS FI Agency) and that the Statements submitted in paper form will not be processed by the BRA.
By submitting the Statement, the legal entity/entrepreneur is considered to have fulfilled the obligation to submit the regular annual financial report and statistical report.
In this regard, we hereby remind all legal entities and entrepreneurs which did not have business activity in 2021 to submit the Statement to the BRA for that year, by 31 March 2022 at the latest, and thus avoid prosecution for an economic offence.
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