ANALYSIS
“Financial Discipline”
Implementation Advances
AmCham recently gathered feedback from 26 companies to gauge the impact of Macedonia’s Law on Financial Discipline, originally adopted almost 2 years ago.
The key findings included:
•
65% of respondents said the Law had
had “no significant impact“ on their
business; 27% said “Bad debt collection
has gotten more difficult”;
•
65% of respondents said they expected
the Law to have “No significant
impact” in 2015-16;
•
81% of respondents said they did not
believe the misdemeanor provisions
defined in the Law are appropriate and
justified;
for late payers. Businesses have complained that the
Law was vague, overlapped with other laws and confused key terms, thereby lessening their sense of legal
certainty. This was further exacerbated by a delay of 11
months for the release of the Law’s official guidelines.
The Law limits the ability of
companies to set their own invoice
payment terms and introduces new
penalties for late payers.
•
50% of respondents said that the exclusion of State
institutions and public enterprises from the Law’s
provisions negatively impacted their companies
liquidity in some way; and
•
53% of those respondents who said that have outstanding claims from a State institution have claims
that have remained unsettled for up to 180 days.
The Law limits the ability of companies to set their own
invoice payment terms and introduces new penalties
The Law was subsequently amended in December 2014
to define the inspection procedure, clarify the implementation period as well as precisely which transactions
would be impacted. However a number of business’
concerns remained unaddressed.
While the Law obligates the Public Revenue Office
(PRO) to begin carrying out payment-related inspections this year, the Ministry of Finance (MoF) responded
that it cannot provide data on such activities until at
least mid-2016. However, AmCham has confirmed
that the PRO now
requires all notaries
to notify them when
they notarize an invoice
that remained unpaid
longer than 60 days.
Financial Discipline-related inspections that
are independent from
notary notifications are
scheduled to start in
2016. Thus, there is no
sign that the Government intends on recalling this Law, as they
have with a number of
others this year.
Continued on page 34
Fall 2015
Issue 47 19