From a board member's point of view, an entrepreneur's or that of a foreigner delegated to develop the company's branch in Poland, the subject question is of fundamental meaning. The answer, as is often the case with taxes, is unambiguous. It all depends on how apt you are to take on extra risks and how much spare time you may allow yourself to spend on solving tax riddles…
The first months in Poland, as in any new place, are challenging: a foreign country, new people. It may still be the same company, but work organisation is somehow different. Not to mention job challenges – new tasks, time pressure and HQ are keeping their eye on you... At this point the CFO who had been delegated from Germany to Poland is showered with unfamiliar documents from HR: declaration of this, declaration of that, one information request, then another, further summaries, and on top of all: Forbearance of fiscal crime doer punishment. What is that even supposed to mean??? Just a warm welcome to the institution of income tax in Poland; or rather to those who have the daily 'pleasure' of dealing with the Polish Tax Office.
Let's say I purchased a company and...
... not everything is quite as I had assumed, although nobody was trying to cheat me. Does that sound familiar? I fear it does. In my job I work with people who are in charge of deciding whether to acquire another company, and if so – for what price. In the course of negotiation the price is usually established as a multiple of EBIT/EBITDA/net profit. I am personally not a supporter of this method. In my opinion it is much better to evaluate a company using the DCF methods in three scenarios: positive, neutral and negative. But who has time for such things these days? Due to its simplicity the multiple method is gaining many supporters among decision-makers.
More than once did I wonder what is the actual meaning of auditing services in Poland. And I came to the conclusion that this meaning is still “greatly underestimated”.
An audit of a financial statement is so much more than just a verification for correctness. I believe a financial audit is, most of all, an opportunity to identify the organisation's “weak points”, allowing management to minimise existing though not always realised risks.
