How to Correct a Tax Declaration in Georgia

A filed tax declaration with a wrong reporting month, a wrong figure or no payment behind it can be corrected. If it is left uncorrected, interest on unpaid tax accrues daily from the original deadline, and a declaration that understates the tax is also penalised. This post explains how to correct a tax declaration in Georgia, how a payment problem on rs.ge is fixed, which records you need, and how a disputed decision is appealed.

Can You Amend a Tax Declaration After Filing It?

Yes. A declaration that was already submitted to the Revenue Service can be corrected. It is better to correct an error yourself than to wait for the Revenue Service to find it, and an early correction tends to mean less interest and a smaller penalty exposure.

An individual entrepreneur with Small Business Status, an LLC and a VAT-registered business each file a monthly declaration by the 15th of the following month, so a business files at least twelve declarations a year. They are filed on the Revenue Service portal, rs.ge, where the forms are in Georgian. A field read wrongly can go in as a mistake that nobody notices until the Revenue Service raises it.

How to Correct a Tax Declaration: Steps

1. Find the declaration and the reporting month it was filed for in the taxpayer section of rs.ge.
2. Recalculate the figure from the month’s documents: the date of each payment on the bank statement, the National Bank rate for each of those dates, and every service bought from abroad that month.
3. Correct the declaration with the Revenue Service for the month it belongs to.
4. Pay any shortfall in lari from a Georgian bank account under the unified treasury code 101001000.
5. After one or two days, log in to rs.ge again and check that the payment shows against your taxpayer account.
6. Record the date, the amount and the confirmation in your own log, because a clean history of filings and payments is not always easy to export from rs.ge.

When a new accountant takes over, the declarations already filed are reviewed and anything wrong is corrected. We correct wrong declarations and file months that were never filed as part of accounting restoration, where each missed month costs ₾270 plus VAT.

Common Mistakes in Tax Declarations

The four common mistakes are a wrong reporting month, a wrong currency rate, a declaration filed without payment and missed reverse VAT.

Mistake	How it happens	The correct treatment
Wrong reporting month	A filing made in one month reports the month before it, and the two get mixed up	Turnover reported in the declaration for the month it belongs to
Wrong currency rate	Income converted at the invoice date’s rate or a monthly average	The National Bank of Georgia’s official rate on the date each payment was received
Declaration without payment	The declaration was submitted and no payment followed	The amount paid from a Georgian bank account under treasury code 101001000
Missed reverse VAT	A service bought from outside Georgia was never declared	18% VAT declared and paid by the buyer, with or without a VAT registration

Wrong Reporting Month

Each declaration reports the month that has just ended and is due by the 15th of the next one. The filing made by 15 February covers January. Selecting the wrong reporting month on the form is one of the most common filing errors.

A VAT-registered business can also report the wrong month, because the taxable moment for VAT is the earliest of delivery, the invoice or an advance payment, not the date the client pays. Work delivered and invoiced on 28 June and paid on 9 July belongs in June’s VAT return.

Wrong Currency Rate

Foreign income is converted to lari at the official National Bank of Georgia rate for the date each payment was received.

Take a 3,000 USD invoice dated the 1st and paid on the 27th. With illustrative rates of 2.70 on the 1st and 2.72 on the 27th, the correct figure is ₾8,160 and the invoice-date figure is ₾8,100, so turnover is understated by ₾60. One difference of that size is small, but the same shortcut repeated every month is a recurring discrepancy that gets checked against the bank statement.

Missed Reverse VAT

Services bought from a supplier outside Georgia, such as software subscriptions, hosting or a foreign contractor, carry 18% reverse VAT that the buyer declares and pays. It applies without a VAT registration, and among new filers no other mistake comes up as often in our work.

An entrepreneur who paid ₾500 a month for foreign software and hosting and never declared it has missed ₾90 of VAT for each month. Over six months that is ₾540, and each month’s amount has carried interest since its own deadline.

Penalties and Interest for a Wrong Tax Declaration

Penalties in Georgia apply automatically. The general penalty rules of the Tax Code of Georgia charge interest for every day a balance stays unpaid after the deadline. A declaration that shows less tax than was due is penalised as well, in addition to the unpaid amount. Late filing and late payment are penalised separately.

The Revenue Service is also in a position to see the error. Each declaration is checked against what the Revenue Service already knows from other sources. That includes what your clients and suppliers declared, your bank and payment records, your VAT inputs and outputs, and what you filed in earlier months.

How to Fix Tax Payment Problems on rs.ge

Filing and paying are separate actions. The payment is made through a Georgian bank, not inside rs.ge, and the filing and the payment are confirmed in two separate places on the portal.

Declaration Filed Without Payment

Submitting the declaration records what you owe but does not pay it. The fix is to pay the calculated amount as a treasury payment from a Georgian bank account, in lari, under code 101001000. Interest has accrued on the balance for every day since the deadline.

Tax Payment Not Showing on rs.ge

The most common cause is a payer name or tax identification number entered at the bank differently from the one registered with the Revenue Service. An old or incorrect treasury code is the other cause.

Compare the treasury code, the taxpayer name and the tax identification number on the bank payment with your Revenue Service account. A payment from a bank account in another name is made with the option for paying on behalf of another party, with the taxpayer’s name and number entered as registered. Revenue Service support works in Georgian, so a mismatch between the bank record and the portal is hard to resolve without a Georgian speaker.

Records You Need to Correct a Declaration

A correction is prepared from the documents of the month it concerns:

• invoices issued and invoices received
• the bank statement or payment confirmation showing the date and currency of each payment
• the contracts behind the invoices
• your own log of what was filed and paid, with dates
• your rs.ge login

Each invoice has to qualify as a tax source document under Article 72 of the Tax Code. That means it is dated, names both parties, describes what was supplied, states its value and exists in at least two identical copies. The document also has to date from the transaction itself. One written up afterwards, working back from what you recall or from the bank statement, does not qualify.

The minimum retention period is three years, counted from 31 December of the year the document belongs to. The ordinary statute of limitations for a tax assessment is also three years, which is how far back an audit can reach.

Tax Audit Types and How to Appeal a Revenue Service Decision

A correction becomes a dispute once the Revenue Service has issued a decision that you disagree with. Georgia runs two kinds of audit, and the field audit ends in a formal written document:

• Desk audit. The Revenue Service asks for documents or an explanation by correspondence. Many desk audits go no further, because the documents settle the question or because a real mistake is fixed and the missing tax paid.
• Field audit. A discrepancy left unresolved at the desk stage is one of the more common reasons a field audit follows. It requires at least 10 working days’ written notice, runs around three months and can be extended by two more.
• Tax act. A field audit ends with a tax act, the written document that sets out the findings.

An appeal against the tax act goes first to the Dispute Resolution Council under the Ministry of Finance and then to court. Each stage has a fixed statutory time limit that runs from the date you received the previous decision. You have the right to have an accountant, a tax adviser or a lawyer act for you at every stage of the audit. Once the Revenue Service has raised a question about a year, the three-year minimum effectively stops being the limit for that year, so keep every record for it until the matter is resolved.