Finance Minister Slavko Linic on Monday ruled out any moratorium or three-month suspension in the introduction of fiscal cash registers, following growing pressure from open-air market vendors who insist that the application of such cash registers is impossible in their working conditions.
Minister Linic said that all who were subject to the legislation on fiscal cash registers had enough time to prepare themselves and that he would not allow exceptions.
"There will be no exemptions. The Finance Ministry has nothing to add," Linic told reporters when asked about the request from fruit and vegetable market traders to be exempt from the fiscalisation act.
He said the relevant legislation had been passed in late 2012 with clearly defined time frames for each business activity to be prepared for the introduction of fiscal cash registers.
He said he would only allow that market sellers be spared of tax administration inspections in the first month upon the installment of fiscal cash registers.
The minister said that there would be no more retrenchment measures by the end of this year and that only further measures could be expected on the revenue side of the 2013 budget.
As for the plans about the revenues for this year, the minister said that they could be realised only through "the fight against the shadow economy".
Fiscal cash registers have been imposed as there isn't enough control over cash transactions in Croatia, Linic explained.
"The more cash transactions, the larger the volume of informal economy," he warned, adding that fiscal cash registers were necessary to curtail the shadow economy.
He recalled that upon the introduction of fiscal cash registers in restaurants and bars, this branch of the economy registered a 60-percent rise in turnover.
Fiscal cash registers are fiscal memory electronic devices used for the control of a country's tax revenues.
