Obligation for Collections and Payments Exceeding TRY 7,000 To Be Made Through Financial Institutions

One of the main problems faced in commercial life is the proof of payments made by merchants to each other or to non-merchants. The basic rule in terms of the Code of Civil Procedure regarding the proof of the payments made is that as of 2023, payments over TRY 14,800 must be proved by a promissory note. In other words, transactions above this limit of proof in terms of amount can be proved only by a promissory note. For this reason, the difficulty of proving payments made by merchants without the intermediation of any financial institution or without the issuance of any document causes violations of the legislation regarding tax obligations and makes it difficult to prove that such payments have been made in various lawsuits. In this context, some regulations have been made with the Tax Procedure Law General Communiqué Sequence No: 459 (Communiqué) published in the Official Gazette numbered 29572 on 24 December 2015.

With the Communiqué, first and second-class merchants, self-employed persons, merchants whose earnings are determined in the simple method, farmers who are obliged to keep books, tax-exempt tradesmen who are obliged to receive invoices within the scope of Article 232/1 of the Tax Procedure Law No. 213, are obliged to make all kinds of collections and payments exceeding TRY 7,000 between themselves or with others through intermediary financial institutions and to certify these collections and payments with documents issued by these institutions. In this context, for example;

• All kinds of collections and payments related to the delivery of goods or performance of services,
• Collections and payments to be made by means of advances, deposits and earnest money,
• All kinds of collections and payments made by the enterprises with their partners and/or other real and legal persons,

in the event that such transactions exceed the specified limit, they must be made through intermediary financial institutions and these transactions must be evidenced by documents issued by such institutions.

Furthermore, under the Communiqué, in the event that the total amount of transactions with the same person or institutions on the same day exceeds TRY 7,000, even if each of the transactions is below the limit determined on a transaction-by-transaction basis, the collections and payments subject to each transaction made from the transaction in which the total amount exceeds TRY 7,000 must also be made through intermediary financial institutions. However, in the event that the transaction amount subject to collection and payment exceeds TRY 7,000, the total amount of the transaction will be taken into account in the partial payment of the price on different dates and each collection and payment will be made through intermediary financial institutions within the scope of the certification obligation.

In case of non-compliance with the obligation to make collections and payments through intermediary financial institutions, a special irregularity penalty amounting to 5 % of the amount subject to the transaction will be imposed under the Repeated Article 355 of the Tax Procedure Law, and the special irregularity penalty to be imposed for 1 year cannot exceed TRY 5,500.000 for 2023.

Finally, it should be noted that the collections and payments that must be made through intermediary financial institutions must be certified by the documents (receipt, account statement, receipt, etc.) issued by these institutions. The documents issued by intermediary financial institutions for the transactions made within the scope of the certification obligation certify the collection or payment related to that transaction, not the transaction. Therefore, the fact that the collections and payments are made through intermediary financial institutions within the scope of the certification obligation will not eliminate the obligation to issue the documents in the Tax Procedure Law regarding the transaction that creates this obligation.

Tagged with: Gökçe, Aslıhan Kayhan, Başak Taş, Commercial & Corporate