Tax subject

What it means

Tax subject is the umbrella term for whoever holds rights and duties towards the tax office: the taxpayer, the payer of tax, the tax debtor and their legal successors. The Tax Code introduces it for tax administration as a whole.

The taxpayer bears the tax; the payer of tax remits it for somebody else - an employer for payroll advances, a paying company for withholding tax. It has nothing to do with being a VAT payer, although the Slovak word is the same.

A legal successor also becomes a tax subject, with everything that comes with the status. When companies merge, the successor takes over not just the assets but the arrears, overpayments, ongoing audits and running deadlines of the company that ceased to exist, often without its management knowing anything about them.

How it works in practice

The status starts with registration and ends when that is cancelled. The tax number, access to electronic communication and the duty to file for periods in which the company did nothing all follow from it.

A representative may act for the subject under a power of attorney delivered to the office. Its scope decides what the accountant signs and what the director has to sign: outside that scope the tax administrator will not deal with them.

A director and his s. r. o. are two separate tax subjects, each with its own tax number and its own taxpayer account. The company’s overpayment cannot be applied to the director’s arrears or the other way round; we make sure every payment leaves with the right reference and to the account of the subject it belongs to.

What to watch out for

An employer as payer of tax answers for the tax it should have withheld from wages, even when it withheld nothing. The office assesses it against the company, not the employee, and from someone who has already left it is rarely recovered.

In liquidation a company does not disappear from the commercial register without the tax office’s consent, and the office withholds it while the taxpayer account shows arrears or filings are missing. One unfiled nil return from an earlier year can hold up closing the company for months and add a penalty on top.