On the Tungsten Blog, Charles Bryant posted an interesting article about the way e-invoicing is excuted in Mexico. Due to a recent mandate, suppliers in Mexico must send digitally signed electronic invoices in the prescribed format to the tax authority. They are then swiftly verified, returned to the supplier and sent to the buyer. This fiscal clearance model accelerates full e-Invoicing adoption and captures more taxes.
As the title suggests, Charles Bryant carefully explores whether Europe should follow this approach. He mentions that Portugal is the first EU country to introduce a similar model and other EU nations that are anxious to close the fiscal gap are planning a similar approach.
He also mentions how some twenty years ago, most systemically important payment systems were re-engineered to Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), where individual inter-bank payments were submitted for real-time settlement across the books of central banks at the time of payment initiation. This avoids the accumulation of huge inter-bank risk positions before the end-of-day settlement.
All in all it is intriguing to ask whether the current path of EU liberalised e-invoicing (without B2B mandates) should perhaps be flipped for a path where mandated e-invoicing and fiscal efficiency go hand in hand.
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