Rules, Regulations and Transaction Costs in Transition Bulgaria

5. Tax registration at the Territorial Tax Administration.
Documents required: copy of court judgement;
copy of BULSTAT registration
certificate;
declaration for tax registration.
The procedure after the registration at court must close within 7 days as from receipt of the court judgement. The
institutions involved must be visited only in the sequence prescribed and each next institution is given copies of the
documents issued by the previous institutions. The lack of co-operation and co-ordination in the work of the
different bodies of public administration actually turns the entrepreneur into a courier linking those bodies and
entails unnecessary time costs.
Reviewing the legislative rules on firm registration, some inconsistencies become clear-cut and they prompt the
following questions:
Why should the merchant copy the court judgement for registration of the firm X times and submit it to
each public institution as many times as he requests a service? Section 5 of the Commercial Code 22
provides that the Commercial Register of the Court shall be public, so all parties and institutions
concerned have access to it;
Why should the BULSTAT identification card (which certifies the BULSTAT code) be copied Y times
and a copy be left to each public authority visited? According to ss. 42 and 43 of the Law on Statistics:
The information in the BULSTAT Registry shall be public, as far as it is derived from documents
for the formation or setting up, transformation or winding up of economic operators;
The National Statistical Institute must provide the authorities of central and local administration
with free-of-charge access to the public information contained in the BULSTAT Registry. Such
access is provided within 3 days as from entering the relevant information in that Registry;
The National Statistical Institute must ensure a daily free-of-charge access to the information
entered in the BULSTAT register to the National Assembly, the Council of Ministers, the
Ministry of Finance, the National Social Security Institute and to other agencies determined by a
decision of the Council of Ministers.
Why should the merchant, at his visit to the territorial tax administration, submit copies of the court
judgement and of the BULSTAT registration certificate, if:
According to s. 45 of the Code of Tax Procedure:
— the tax authorities must receive free-of-charge information from any court and public registers
concerning the tax payers, including those tax payers whose court registration is struck out;
22 Section 5: "Everyone shall have the right to inspect the Commercial Register and the documents on the basis of which
the entries therein have been made, and to receive copies therefrom."
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