Attention points for prepayments in 2019

Prepayments are essential for a company in a tax paying position that wishes to avoid an additional surcharge. Prepayments for the first quarter of 2019 (assessment year 2020 (AY 2020)) should be done on a new account number and at last April 10 2019 (for companies with a financial year ending on December 31st 2019).   The tax administration works on the MyMinFin Pro platform to allow tax payers to consult and administer their prepayments online in future.

No company is obliged to prepay its CIT. However, it is the only way to avoid the CIT surcharge of 6,75% that applies if no or not enough prepayments are made.

Each tax prepayment leads to a credit, which reduces the overall CIT surcharge. The amount of the credit depends on which quarter of the financial year the prepayment was done. As you can see below, a payment made in the first quarter will lead to the highest tax credit, while a payment made in the fourth quarter will only lead to half of the first tax credit.

For prepayment purposes, the quarters end by the 10th day of the fourth, seventh and tenth month of the accounting year, and the 20th day of the last month. This means that for a December 31st 2019 financial year end, a credit cannot be obtained anymore if the prepayment is done after December 20th  2019.

Below you can find an overview of prepayment deadlines and corresponding credit rates for a financial year ending December 31st 2019 (AY2020).

To determine the amount of the prepayments needed, the resulting tax liability of the year should be forecasted. To ensure that no CIT surcharge would arise, it is possible to make sufficient prepayments in the first or second quarter, as these credit rates exceed the surcharge rate. However, cash-flow requirements of the company would need to be taken into account.

If, for the year ending December 31st, 2018 too much prepayments were made the tax payer can opt to have the excess prepayments either refunded or used as a tax prepayment for the following tax year by means of a written request to be done ultimately within one month after receipt of the prepayments slip. Please note that in practice most tax payers received the account extract at the end of February resulting in most cases in a response time till end of March 2019.

As from 2019, the account number for prepayments made has been changed to BE61 6792 0022 9117. Prepayments done for AY 2020 must be paid to this new account number.

In a transition period, prepayments made to the old  account number will  be transferred by the tax authorities to the new account number. This may however have an impact on the payment allocation date.  We highly recommend to use immediately the right account number.

For companies with a financial year ending on December 30th 2019  or earlier, prepayments for  assessment year 2019 still need to be done to the existing account number: BE20 6792 0023 3056.

For the digitalization of the prepayments process, the tax authorities will make use of the MyMinfin platform.

As such, taxpayers will be able to consult an overview of their prepayments of the last three assessment years via the site MyMinfin Pro. This overview is merely informative and does not confer any rights to the taxpayer. Filing of requests to rectify material errors, to transfer, to reimburse or to carry-forward the amount of prepayments done will also be possible via this site.

These new modalities came into force by Royal Decree on March 1st 2019.

Apparently, the platform is currently expected to go online in April 2019.