Contrary to popular opinion, the government’s Twój e-PIT is not an automatic method of settling taxes. Twój e-PIT effectively protects taxpayers from penalties for failing to fulfill their tax obligations, and this is primarily why it was introduced—but it does not automatically include important benefits. Some reliefs, costs and even sources of income must be entered manually.
“Before April 30, it is worth checking, for example, which tax reliefs we are entitled to, how the family relief was calculated and whether deductible costs were calculated correctly—particularly for contracts of mandate, contracts for specific work and creators subject to the 50% limit. By doing nothing, we often expose ourselves to paying higher tax and receiving a smaller refund. Another critical issue is allocating 1.5% of tax to a Public Benefit Organization. If we do not indicate an OPP ourselves in our return, our money will not help anyone; it will simply go to the state treasury, like all tax,” warns Monika Piątkowska, tax adviser at e-pity.pl.
Fast and intuitive verification
Sometimes, instead of checking your Twój e-PIT yourself, it is much simpler and more convenient to file using one of the free programs. Programs such as e-pity include guided tools that help complete the return step by step and make sure that nothing is overlooked, including tax reliefs.
“We load the pre-completed PIT from the government’s Twój e-PIT service into the program and then, together with the intelligent wizard, continuously verify the imported data and add any missing reliefs. While the return is being completed, the e-pity program checks the applicable deduction limits and prevents mistakes. We also do not need to worry if we add income that requires a declaration other than PIT-37. The e-pity program will verify which declaration is appropriate and automatically transfer all the data entered so far to it,” says Artur Kaczmarek, communications director at e-file.
The free program can be used online or downloaded to your device—computer, tablet or smartphone—from the official https://www.e-pity.pl/ website.
An unpleasant surprise—you do not have a PIT-11. Don’t panic!
Sometimes, when checking our tax settlement, we discover that one of our PIT-11 forms is missing. Even if April 30 is just around the corner, we can still handle the situation.
“If all attempts to contact the employer to obtain the PIT-11 have failed, we must take the following steps: determine the amount of our remuneration ourselves—on the basis of a written contract or the actual transfers from the employer; add up the remuneration received throughout the year; determine the deductible costs and the tax advances that the employer should have paid to the tax authority, as well as the ZUS and health insurance contributions that should have been paid on our remuneration; and enter these hypothetical amounts of remuneration, determined as precisely as possible. We submit the final tax return to the tax office together with an explanatory letter stating that the payer—the employer—failed to perform the function imposed on them and that the annual PIT return was prepared on the basis of information determined independently,” explains Monika Piątkowska, tax adviser at e-pity.pl.
The taxpayer always has the final say
Despite government conveniences, the taxpayer’s primary responsibility remains determining whether the PIT prepared by the state contains everything that should be declared. Tax authorities do not know the details of our personal and professional circumstances, do not respond instantly to certain changes and cannot predict what we should add, such as additional sources of income or amounts from missing PIT-11 forms.
“It is worth remembering that the government’s Twój e-PIT service can make things easier, but only if we also check the settlement prepared by the tax authorities. Verification in a trusted program allows us to check whether we have entered all the reliefs to which we are entitled, whether the data is definitely correct and whether we have indicated the OPP that we will support this year,” concludes Artur Kaczmarek, communications director at e-file.