In the second part of this series, we saw that in the European VAT scenario the invoice is a means of exchanging information between two VAT payers, which meets the legal requirements to be considered a valid record of a taxable transaction. 

In a different legal scenario, in Latin America usually an invoice is a document that records information about a taxable transaction. 

There is abundant literature on what the different branches of Law, especially procedural ones, consider as intrinsic characteristics so that a thing, in the legal sense of this word, can be accepted as a document. These characteristics, or requirements, are usually summarized in three: 

• Authorship, the quality by which a document is considered to come from an identified or identifiable author. It unequivocally answers the question “Who produced or issued this document?” 

• Authenticity, the property of a document to have its origin demonstrably attributed to the declared author, without falsifying the identity of the issuer. It responds positively to the question “Was the document really issued by whoever claims to have issued it?” 

• Non-repudiation, the guarantee that the author cannot validly deny having produced the document. It responds negatively to the question “Can the author deny having issued this document?”. 

Evidently the ways of associating these characteristics with things vary with the nature of those things. A paper, a stone, an artifact, a construction, a digital file, among other things, can all combine these three characteristics and, consequently, be considered a document in the legal sense of this word. 

In the construction of definitions that we have been making, we are interested in digital files, and in the means necessary for digital files to present those three characteristics. 

These means are irrelevant to our discussion: let’s just consider that due to tax legislation, in Latin America invoices must be documents. 

Consequently, electronic invoices must be electronic documents, with authorship, authenticity and non-repudiation. As an additional consequence, the digital files that materially constitute electronic invoices cannot be altered, translated or transformed in any way, as these operations remove from the digital files at least one of those three intrinsic characteristics. 

A good illustration of the definition of an electronic invoice in this context is that provided by the Dirección General de Ingresos de Panamá through the Resolución N° 201-0235, del 11 de enero de 2018, Por medio de la cual se autoriza el uso de factura electrónica en Panamá: Electronic Invoice is an electronic document of exclusively digital existence, through which transactions involving goods and/or services are registered and proven, issued by electronic means, which confers tax validity on the commercial operations carried out, which will be signed electronically, validated by the General Directorate of Tickets, and will constitute an executive title. 

[continues] 

16 total views, 16 views today