ELECTRONIC SALES SUPPRESSION: A THREAT TO TAX REVENUES

Fiscal Tills
ELECTRONIC SALES SUPPRESSION: A THREAT TO TAX REVENUES © OECD 2013
ANNEX: FISCAL TILLS AND CERTIFIED POS SYSTEMS – 37
Annex: Fiscal Tills and Certified POS systems
Fiscal tills were introduced by legislation in a number of countries more than twenty
five years ago and there has been a recent increase of interest in their use. Essentially,
they are cash registers that are required to conform to a set of specified technical
requirements to secure data storage and to monitor events within the system. They were
first introduced in Italy back in 1983, when the Government created the obligation for
certain businesses to issue a fiscal receipt by means of a fiscal electronic cash register in
an attempt to reduce the size of the shadow or underground economy. This approach was
also adopted by Greece and a number of other countries. Each country’s government
determined what the system should record, how it should store the data, and what kind of
output (reports/files and receipts) the system should be able to produce in specified
formats in order to secure the data for tax audits.
Specific requirements include:
• electronic preservation of the detailed data of transactions in specified formats,
encrypted in specified ways and on specified storage devices;
• detailed records that are only available for the tax auditor when required;
• preservation of a complete audit trail and in some cases event monitoring;
• the system is equipped with some kind of a monitoring apparatus; and
• other technical measures to guard against subsequent alterations in a manner that
will assure that data-integrity is maintained.
In early versions fiscal tills secured the sales data at the end of day operations, while
the approach now generally taken is to secure data at the time of the data creation.
The working method can be described as follows. At the end of every working day,
the entrepreneur has to generate a Z-report (daily financial report). The total sales
reflected in that report are then written to a protected memory, where the counters are
updated with the sales totals of that particular day. Later on, in some countries, the
counters were expanded to include ticket counters, refund totals and other items.
Originally, the protected memory (ROM) was sealed and secured in the machine
itself, by fixing it to the chassis with resin or epoxy. When cash registers became more
and more sophisticated and became more and more pc-based systems, it was no longer
mandatory for the protected memory to be placed inside the chassis of the terminal, but it
could be placed instead in the separate printer of the system (then called a fiscal printer).
The issued receipt specifically states whether it is a genuine fiscal receipt,
representing a recorded sale, or is produced for training, as a pro forma invoice, or a copy
ticket. The fiscal receipts also have a stamp in the footer, containing a fiscal logo that
must meet some specific requirements, regarding the font and lay-out.