Improvements to the payment process of business taxes in 2025

For business and corporate taxpayers, the tasks relating to payments have long been known as an annoying reason for extra work. Not only taxes but also refunds require several official procedures to be followed. As a result, companies, accounting firms and the Tax Administration itself may often see them as a time-consuming, costly exercise.

To improve clarity and simplicity, the Tax Administration and the Ministry of Finance plan to make payment-related tasks more efficient. Reference is made to the Government’s policy programme, which contains an initiative to streamline tax collecting and to make taxation more predictable.

The Government proposal concerning these improvements has been prepared and sent to the interested parties for comment. Several changes to the present state of affairs are proposed:

(1) Business taxpayers would not need more than one reference number

Plans are underway to replace today’s bank reference numbers that are specific for every category of tax. One single string of numbers would replace them. Business taxpayers would only quote a single reference number for paying all their taxes. This way, the Tax Administration would apply inbound payments to the taxpayer’s outstanding tax debt in the order of due dates, oldest first.

Current tax rules require every type of tax to have its own reference number. This means that the taxpayers need to send their payments with the exactly right number, because otherwise the payment would not be matched with the tax that it was intended for. The proposed changes would improve transparency and provide relief from the necessity to select the right reference number.

However, the plan based on just one reference number would not extend to individual taxpayers, self-employed operators of trade or business, operators of agriculture and forestry. These groups of taxpayers would continue paying the varying types of taxes as before.

(2) Simplified self-assessed tax payments including refunding

Self-assessed taxes are VAT, employer's contributions, excise duties, and several other taxes and charges. A further streamlining would concern the taxes for which the business taxpayer must quote a reference number for self-assessed taxes:

• Whereas today, at every calendar month’s end, the money the taxpayer has paid in often becomes applied as a settlement of other types of taxes owed, the new simplified process would no longer involve this. Instead, the money would wait for the taxpayer’s other self-assessed taxes, or sometimes wait for the taxpayer’s request to receive a refund.
• Credit balances in a taxpayer’s account would no longer earn interest although the taxpayer sends the Tax Administration a payment many days before due date. However, the new simplified process would not affect the credit interest that the Tax Administration normally adds to refunds.

The changes to self-assessment would also include a simplified refund mechanism. Taxpayers would no longer be entitled to ask the Tax Administration to retain the money that would otherwise be refunded. Instead, the Tax Administration would send all refunds to all taxpayers immediately after processing. In addition, the changes would alter the treatment of refunds of self-assessed taxes: they would become coverage for the taxpayer’s all taxes as needed, instead of being applicable for self-assessed taxes that have fallen due.

(3) Improved clarity in how refundable amounts are applied

Under today’s tax rules, certain taxpayers expecting a refund connected to one type of tax cannot benefit from it if they have a tax of another category to pay at a due date too close to the refund’s first date of availability. As a result, the taxpayer must pay the tax regardless of the refund. The streamlining will aim for a chronological system, where the Tax Administration would refrain from applying the refunds but instead apply any payment coming from a taxpayer based on its actual date of payment.

(4) Business enterprises and the self-employed would receive the summary electronically, not by post

Up to now, the Tax Administration has sent 1.2 million paper-printed summaries every year to different groups of taxpayers including companies and operators of agriculture. With the proposed streamlining, the summaries would only appear in MyTax, the e-service that the majority of taxpayers is using today.

Planned schedule

The changes to payment and refund processes are scheduled for November 2025. In self-assessment, the existing practice to retain the money that would otherwise be refunded would be discontinued in the fall of 2025.

We will release further information and updates about the changes soon.

Read more: The Ministry of Finance’s project pages (in Finnish)