The Central Balance Sheet Office in a new guise in 2022

The Central Balance Sheet Office, part of the National Bank of Belgium (NBB), will implement changes from January 2022 that may have an impact on the way in which you file annual accounts. Filing on paper is no longer possible, online submission is becoming easier.

Registration

New possibilities for registration are coming. Currently, you can only log in with your identity card and a card reader. As from 2022, the Central Balance Sheet Office will be connected to the CSAM application, which means that you can also log in with special tokens, Itsme or via an eIDAS application (a European recognized electronic signature).

The Central Balance Sheet Office will therefore connect to the 'e-Box enterprise' platform. This is an already existing platform, to which you can have your official communication with the government institutions sent, just like with my-eBox. The FPS Economy, the social security services and the Flemish Tax Authorities are already making use of this.
For example, you will find the confirmation of the filing of your annual accounts. This is currently still done on paper, but from 2022 this will only be done via e-Box enterprise.
More information about the platform can be found at www.eboxenterprise.be.

Publication

The application is also being modified to speed up publication.
Initially, the NBB makes online payment possible. Since in most cases your accountant takes care of the administrative side of the filing, the new application provides that the authorized representative can forward a secure link to his client.

Please note that the account number of the Central Balance Sheet Office will change.
Together with a few other changes, the simpler payment also ensures that the annual accounts can be published shortly after the payment has been validated.

And thanks to the new application, you can now also download accounting data in text format.

Documents to be filed

For some time, it looked as if there would also be changes in the legal models of the financial statements, but that currently no longer seems to be the case. There will be a new application to prepare and file the annual accounts. The different current applications will be replaced by a single application. The test environment for this 'Filin' application has been available since the end of September.

The XBRL format, which should be used for your annual accounts, will be replaced by an XBRL 2.1 standard. The old XBRL format will no longer be valid as from 2022. The new standard has the advantage that you no longer have to present the documents at the Central Balance Sheet Office together as a whole. In concrete terms, this means that you can present the annual accounts at one time and all other documents at another time.
The Central Balance Sheet Office warns that such split filing is the exception; joint filing remains the rule.

PDF versions

You can file annual accounts in the form of a structured data file or in the form of a PDF file. The structured data files (XBRL) undergo certain arithmetic and logical checks when they are filed, a bit similar as to VAT returns.
This was currently not possible for annual accounts in the form of a PDF, so that the audit had to be done afterwards and that could then lead to the publication of a modified filing. But as from 1 January 2022, the annual accounts drawn up in the form of a PDF file will also be subject to arithmetic and logical checks before they are accepted.