At the end of 2016, the Polish Ministry of Economic Development joined OpenPEPPOL as the Polish PEPPOL Authority and became member number 200 of the Association. Joining OpenPEPPOL is the first step of a Polish plan for building a new national e-invoicing framework based on PEPPOL services and standards.
The Polish government has started building the national services platform (PeF) supporting electronic invoicing for public procurement. In regards to the Directive 2014/55/EU, the platform will serve as the electronic invoice exchange.
PeF will be the single point of European e-invoice delivery to public entities in Poland. The project aims at helping public entities in implementing the Directive regulations. In order to simplify the invoicing process change management, the PeF services will be offered free of charge. The services and mentioned documents will be compliant with the European Norm of electronic invoicing for public procurement and for the short list of the syntaxes accompanying the Norm (see illustration).
Illustration: Polish national e-invoicing framework based on PEPPOL services and standards
The new platform will consist of PEPPOL Access Points implemented by service providers. The service providers will be selected in a tender procedure organized in Q1 2017. The project started in October 2016, and is managed by the Ministry of Economic Development in a joint partnership with the Institute of Logistics and Warehousing.
The implementation of PeF services will follow in three steps. The first stage of the project is the selection of the future PEPPOL Access Point service providers, which ends in Q2 2017. In Q1 2018 the first PeF functionalities: e-invoicing and e-ordering will be started. Finally, the project will end in Q3 2019 delivering full PeF functionality (including DesAdv, RecAdv and reporting) to the public and private users.
The project provides complementary services, such as education and PeF promotion dedicated to public and private stakeholders. An important aspect of the PeF project is spreading knowledge about PEPPOL standards of communication and e-document specifications. The project targets the Polish IT sector, especially application and service providers as one of the most important building blocks of the Polish e-invoicing framework.
The Polish Government is considering implementing the obligation of issuing structured e-invoicing by suppliers to public authorities. It is planned to be implemented two years after the Directive 2014/55/EU implementation.