Pending Deadline for Submitting the Statement of Inactivity for 2021

The Law on Accounting (Official Gazette of the RS, No. 73/2019 and 44/2021) (“Law”) stipulates the obligation for legal entities and entrepreneurs that did not have business events in the reporting year, nor did they have data on assets in the business books for that year, to submit a Statement of Inactivity (“Statement”) for that reporting year by March 31 of the following year at the latest.

In this regard, all legal entities and entrepreneurs which were not active in 2021 are obliged to submit the Statement for 2021 by March 31, 2022, at the latest. In practice, these can be the so-called "shell companies" that do not have business activities because they serve for some future business activities, but also all other companies, associations, cooperatives, entrepreneurs, etc. that were not active in 2021 for whichever reason.

The Law treats the failure to submit the Statement as an economic offense, with the threat of the following fines:

– RSD 100,000 to RSD 3,000,000 for a legal entity;
– RSD 20,000 to RSD 150,000 for the responsible person in a legal entity.

Proceedings before commercial courts in the Republic of Serbia, which are conducted to prosecute entrepreneurs, legal entities and responsible persons in these legal entities for having failed to submit the Statement, are very numerous in practice, which we assume to be due to the unawareness of this obligation, says the Milosevic Law Firm.

In addition, the fact that a legal entity has been deleted from the register of the Business Registers Agency (“BRA”) in the meantime does not exclude further prosecution of the responsible person in that legal entity if this economic offense was committed during the period when the legal entity was registered.

The Statement is submitted to the BRA in electronic form, signed by a qualified electronic signature of the legal representative, with the obligation to pay a fee for processing the Statement and making it public.

– We draw your attention to the fact that the Statement is submitted to the BRA through the information system (the so-called PIS FI Agency) and that the Statements submitted in paper form will not be processed by the BRA – they add.

By submitting the Statement, the legal entity/entrepreneur is considered to have fulfilled the obligation to submit the regular annual financial report and statistical report.

For more information about this subject, you may contact Milosevic Law Firm.

Advokatska kancelarija Milošević

Agencija za privredne registre

Milošević Law Firm

Milosevic Law

Business Registers Agency

BRA

Law on Accounting

Statement of Inactivity

legal persons

entrepreneurs

companies

associations

cooperatives

entrepreneurs

shell companies