Poland: Ministry of Finance Extends the KSeF Penalty Deferral to 31 December 2027, but Only by a Bill It Has Not Yet Drafted

KGT Country Update  |  18 September 2026  |  VAT, e-invoicing and SAF-T monitor

On 16 September 2026, the Polish Ministry of Finance announced that the period during which taxpayers will not be penalized for errors in operating the National e-Invoice System (KSeF) will be extended to 31 December 2027. The announcement is an official Ministry communication, not a legislative act: the Ministry states expressly that the extension requires a statutory amendment and that it is only now beginning work on the bill.

The deferral covers errors in using the system. It does not suspend the obligation to use it, and the Ministry says the National Revenue Administration will still act where invoices are issued outside KSeF or where non-use has produced unreliable VAT settlements.

Background

KSeF became mandatory on 1 February 2026 for taxpayers with turnover above PLN 200 million and on 1 April 2026 for all other taxpayers. A set of transitional arrangements for particular categories of taxpayer runs until 31 December 2026. The Ministry's announcement frames the position simply: because those transitional periods end on 31 December 2026, from 1 January 2027 use of KSeF becomes mandatory for all entrepreneurs.

The original design paired that date with the start of the penalty regime. Errors made during 2026 were not to be penalised; from 2027 they would be. The effect was that the smallest taxpayers those with the least implementation capacity would move from a standing start into a fully enforced regime on the same day. Businesses, industry organisations and tax practitioners pressed the Ministry on precisely that point, and the Ministry has accepted the argument.

The Legislative Change

Strictly, no legislative change has yet occurred, and that distinction is the most important fact in this update. What exists today is a Ministry announcement published on the Ministry of Finance pages of the gov.pl portal on 16 September 2026. The closing paragraph of that announcement is unambiguous: the proposed extension of the deferral period requires statutory amendment, and the Ministry is commencing work on a bill so as to allow adequate time for the legislative process.

The Minister of Finance, Andrzej Domański, is quoted in the announcement as saying that KSeF has been and continues to be widely consulted with businesses, industry organisations, tax advisers and software providers, that the Ministry listens to the market and responds to the needs raised, and that extending the deferral is a reasonable solution which gives businesses more time to implement the new processes fully while maintaining the pace of digitalisation of the tax system.

Marcin Loboda, Head of the National Revenue Administration and Secretary of State in the Ministry of Finance, is quoted as saying that the proposal increases the safety of the KSeF implementation and makes it easier for businesses to prepare for full operation in the new system, and that it is a further example of effective cooperation between the market and the administration.

For a compliance function, the operative consequence is that the protection cannot yet be relied on. Until a bill is published, passed, and brought into force, the penalty regime commencing in 2027 remains the law. A program plan that treats 31 December 2027 as a settled date is planning against a policy statement rather than against a statute.

Scope

The deferral concerns penalties for errors connected with the use of KSeF. It is a deferral of sanction, not a deferral of obligation.

It does not change the mandate dates, the FA(3) invoice format, the KSeF number and acknowledgment mechanics, or the offline procedures.

The Ministry states that the National Revenue Administration will, in the first instance, support taxpayers in the correct use of KSeF and remind them of their obligations under the VAT Act.

Because the system is mandatory, the Ministry states that the authorities will nonetheless react where invoices are issued outside KSeF other than in the cases specified by statute, and will examine whether non-use of the system has led to unreliable settlement of the tax.

The announcement does not define which categories of error qualify for protection. That definition, if it is given at all, will come in the bill.

Timeline

1 February 2026 KSeF becomes mandatory for taxpayers with turnover above PLN 200 million.

1 April 2026 KSeF becomes mandatory for all other taxpayers.

16 September 2026 Ministry of Finance announces the extension of the penalty deferral to 31 December 2027 and states that it is commencing work on the necessary bill.

31 December 2026 transitional periods for the remaining categories of taxpayer end, on the Ministry's own statement of the position.

1 January 2027 use of KSeF becomes mandatory for all entrepreneurs.

31 December 2027 proposed end of the extended penalty deferral, subject to enactment.

Businesses Affected

Every taxable person issuing invoices in Poland is within scope, including foreign groups with Polish VAT registrations issuing through SAP or through a third-party access provider. The Ministry identifies the smallest businesses as the principal intended beneficiaries, because their transitional periods end on 31 December 2026 and they would otherwise face full exposure from the first day of mandatory operation. The Ministry adds that the extension also meets the needs of other market participants, who gain additional time to refine the processes around their use of the system.

Multinational groups should not read the announcement as addressed only to small Polish companies. A group running several Polish registrations through a single SAP landscape typically carries a higher absolute error volume than a small domestic filer, and the deferral applies to error, not to size.

Required Actions

Do not re-baseline the implementation plan based on the announcement. Treat 31 December 2027 as a proposed date and keep the programme aligned to 1 January 2027 until a bill is in force.

Track the bill through the Government Legislation Centre and the Journal of Laws. The wording that matters is the definition of the errors covered field-level validation failures, late transmission, authorization failures, use of the offline procedure, rejected invoices and failures originating in the ERP or middleware are all plausible candidates and none of them is named in the announcement.

Strengthen the evidence trail now. Where a deferral turns on whether an error was a genuine implementation mistake, the contemporaneous record of detection, escalation and correction is what distinguishes it from indifference.

Keep the reconciliation between KSeF submissions, the SAP billing document and JPK_V7M running continuously. The Ministry has said it will examine whether non-use of KSeF has led to unreliable tax settlement; a reconciliation that closes to zero is the answer to that question.

Review invoice-issuance paths that bypass KSeF. The announcement reserves enforcement for exactly that case, and the deferral offers no shelter there.

Practical Implications

The deferral changes the financial risk profile of the first year of full operation without changing the operational one. Invoices still have to reach KSeF, still have to be acknowledged, and still have to reconcile to the VAT return. What changes is the cost of getting some of that wrong while the process beds in.

There is a second-order effect worth naming. A deferral of this kind tends to reduce the internal urgency of remediation work that is already funded and scheduled, and the year gained is easily spent. The organizations that will benefit most are those that use it to retire manual workarounds put in place during 2026, not those that defer the work by the same twelve months.

Finally, the announcement is a reminder of how the Polish mandate is actually governed. A decision of this significance was communicated through a Ministry news item, not through a draft law, and the legal position is unchanged until the bill arrives. Monitoring the mandate at the level of the Ministry's own pages, rather than through secondary summaries, is not optional.

Expected Next Steps

The instrument to watch is the bill. It will show the drafting technique used  whether the existing deferral provision is amended by substituting a date, or whether a new and differently scoped protection is created and whether the protection is defined by reference to categories of error. It will also show the commencement mechanics, which matter because the current deferral expires on 31 December 2026 and any gap between expiry and enactment would leave a period of full exposure.

KGT will report the bill when it is published and will set out what it does and does not cover. In the meantime the Ministry's KSeF information portal remains the authoritative source for operational guidance.

How Can KGT Support You?

KGT delivers SAP-integrated electronic invoicing and statutory reporting. Our SAP add-on for KSeF produces the FA(3) structured invoice from SAP billing data, manages authentication and session handling, and reconciles the KSeF acknowledgment back to the SAP document so that the compliance record and the accounting record cannot drift apart. That reconciliation is the control that matters most during a penalty deferral, because it is the evidence that an error was detected and corrected rather than left in the system.

For clients running SAP Document and Reporting Compliance we support scoping, configuration, country activation, credential governance across multiple Polish registrations, and the reconciliation controls between KSeF, JPK_V7M and the VAT return. Where a client is choosing between an add-on and a DRC country version, we give an even-handed assessment of which fits their landscape and release calendar.

This country update is provided for general information only and does not constitute tax, legal or professional advice.