Amendment of the annual accounts law for financial years beginning as of 1 January 2016

With the Act of 18 December 2015, the Belgian legislature amended the annual accounts law for all financial years that begin on or after 1 January 2016, in response to European Directive 2013/34/EU (the "annual financial statements directive"). The obligations are made more flexible for SME´s, with the objective of reducing the costs for the annual accounts. The changes, about which we already reported in an earlier newsletter, have thus been implemented in the meantime.

The Directive allows the Member States greater freedom to structure their own annual accounts law, so that the conformity of the regulations in the different Member States might decrease.

Belgium is implementing several of the simplifications that the European legislature permits, but is not going as far as the directive authorises.

Firstly, the category of "micro-companies" is added. These are companies that do not form part of a group of companies and which do not exceed two of the three following thresholds: the annual average of the employee pool amounts to ten personnel members; the annual turnover exclusive of VAT is not higher than 700,000.00 EUR; and the balance sheet total amounts to no more than 350,000.00 EUR.  

Secondly, the category of "small companies" is expanded by raising the thresholds.

The annual account schemes were simplified for these categories of companies, and the standard models are modified as a result.

The notion of "small group" is henceforth known as a "group of limited size" and the thresholds were also increased for this, so that fewer groups of companies will have to prepare consolidated annual accounts as of financial year 2016.

Finally, the most direct cost reduction concerns the cost for filing the annual accounts. Since from now on the annual accounts will no longer have to be published in the Belgian Official Journal, given that they can be easily consulted via the National Bank of Belgium´s Central Balance Sheet Office, the rates for filing were reduced. 

The annual accounts of a micro-company must be submitted electronically as an ".xbrl" file. The other companies may file the annual accounts as either an ".xbrl" file or a ".pdf" file.

For more information you can consult Sophie Deckers (author) and Gwen Bevers (head of the Business Law practice group).