Article 2 of the Promotion of Electronic Invoicing and Creation of a Public Sector Accounting Register of Invoices Act 25/2013, published in the BOE on 28 December 2013, regulates the scope of application of the law, and therefore the ARI, in the following terms:
The provisions of this Act shall apply to invoices issued (either on paper or in electronic format) as part of the legal relationships between the suppliers of goods and services and the public administrations
For the purposes of the provisions of this law, bodies, organisations and agencies referred to in article 3.2 of the reformed text of the Public Sector Contracts Act, approved by Royal Legislative Decree 3/2011, dated 14 November, shall be considered as public administrations. That means:
- The General State Administration, the administrations of the Autonomous Communities and the bodies making up the local administration.
- The management bodies and common services of the Social Security system.
- Autonomous bodies.
- Public universities.
- Bodies in public law which, with functional independence or special autonomy recognised by Law, have attributed to them external regulation or control functions over a particular sector or activity, and
- Bodies in public law linked to one or more public administrations or dependent on them, with any of the following characteristics:
- 1. if their main activity does not consist of producing goods and services intended for individual or collective consumption under a market system or carrying out operations to redistribute income or national wealth, on a not-for-profit basis in all cases, or
- 2. if they are not principally financed with income of whatever kind obtained in exchange for delivering goods or providing services.
Article 9.1 of the Promotion of Electronic Invoicing and Creation of a Public Sector Accounting Register of Invoices Act 25/2013, published in the BOE on 28 December 2013 has established exceptions by regulation: the State, the Autonomous Communities and the municipalities of Madrid and Barcelona may, by regulation, exempt from this obligation for notation in the accounting register invoices of up to 5,000 euros, as well as invoices issued by external service providers for any Public Administration until, in the judgement of the Ministry of Finance and Public Administrations, these invoices meet the requirements for presentation via the general entry point for electronic invoices and the external services have appropriate means and systems to receive them.
For the purposes of the type of invoice subject to notation in the accounting register of invoices, the provisions of article 4 of the Act are relevant in relation to the use of electronic invoices in the public sector making the use of electronic invoices compulsory (from 15 January 2015 and in the objective scope of the law) via the general entry point used by the agencies that are already using them for the remote data transfer of information to the tax agency: a) public limited companies; b) private limited companies; c) individuals and organisations without legal identity and without Spanish nationality; d) permanent establishments and branches of organisations not resident on Spanish territory under the terms established by tax law; e) temporary consortiums of companies; f) economic interest groups, European economic interest groups, pension funds, venture capital funds, investment funds, asset use funds, funds for regularising the mortgage market, mortgage securitisation funds or investment guarantee funds.
All this also without prejudice to the possibility of the exemption by regulation from this obligation for electronic invoicing, established in article 4, for invoices of up to 5,000 euros, as well as invoices issued by external service providers for any public administration until, in the judgement of the Ministry of Finance and Public Administrations, these invoices meet the requirements for presentation via the general entry point for electronic invoices and the external services have appropriate means and systems to receive them.
The above does not exclude the possibility that a supplier not obliged to use electronic invoices may present one, but, in all cases, it will have to do so via the corresponding general entry point.