Ex Officio Tax Assessment for Belgian Companies

Your SRL closed 2025 with a €6,000 loss. The corporate tax return for that year was due in Biztax on 30 September 2026 and nobody filed it. A few months later a letter arrives from the FPS Finance: it intends to tax the company on a profit of €49,300.

That is an ex officio assessment, imposition d'office in French and aanslag van ambtswege in Dutch. The administration sets the taxable base itself. For companies, the law sets a minimum.

This article is informational, not legal or tax advice.

Already past the deadline

If your return for a year closed on 31 December 2025 is not in, do this now, before any letter arrives:

1. Finish the accounts for the year. Everything below depends on them, and rebuilding a year's books takes time.
2. File the return in Biztax as soon as it is ready. If the platform will not take it, contact your tax office and file it with them.
3. Keep the return, the accounts and the proof of the date you filed. You will need all three if a notice or an assessment follows.

A late return does not take you out of the rules below. Late filing is one of the grounds for an ex officio assessment, and the €49,300 minimum covers late returns as well as missing ones. What a late return does is put your real figures in front of the administration, and those figures are what you need to displace the minimum.

When the administration can use it

Article 351 of the Income Tax Code (CIR 92 / WIB 92) limits the procedure to specific failures by the taxpayer:

• No return, or a return filed after the deadline
• Form defects in the return that you did not correct in time
• Books and documents not produced when requested
• A request for information under article 316 left unanswered, or answered incompletely
• No reply in time to a notice of rectification of the return

The list is closed. An ex officio assessment made outside these cases is void (Cass. 11 June 2020, F.19.0036.N), and it is up to the administration to show that one of them applies.

The €49,300 minimum

Individuals assessed ex officio are taxed on what the administration can presume from the information it holds. Companies have an extra rule. Under article 342, §4, when a company files no return or files late, its taxable profit is set at no less than a statutory minimum. The base amount is €40,000, indexed every year. The FPS Finance indexation notice for assessment year 2026 sets it at €49,300.

The minimum is a presumption, not a penalty, and you can rebut it by proving your actual result. Until you do, a company that made a loss or never invoiced anything is assessed on €49,300. On the opening example:

The increase and the fine are explained below. Three things push the real figure higher or lower:

• Advance payments. A company that made none pays a surcharge on the tax as well, unless it is a small company in its first three financial years.
• The rate. The table uses the standard 25%. The 20% SME rate on the first €100,000 requires, among other conditions, at least €45,000 of director's remuneration for the year (or remuneration equal to the taxable result if lower). A loss-making SRL has usually not paid that.
• Carried-forward losses. The Court of Cassation held on 22 May 2014 that recoverable tax losses must be deducted from profits fixed under article 342. Ask your accountant how the administration applies that to your year before relying on it.

Late payment interest comes on top.

The minimum rises with repeat offences. If the company was already assessed on the minimum for one of the four previous assessment years, the minimum is increased by 25% for the second offence, 50% for the third, 100% for the fourth and 200% from the fifth (article 182, §2/1 of the royal decree implementing the CIR). Only earlier assessments made on the minimum count. A late filing that was sanctioned with a fine alone does not.

The tax increase and the fine

Tax increase (article 444). For a first offence without intent to evade, the scale is 10%, then 20% and 30% for later offences. Since the programme law of 18 July 2025, a first offence in good faith carries no increase at all, and good faith is presumed. That presumption expressly does not apply to an ex officio assessment. You can still prove good faith yourself, but the 10% is the starting point. No increase is due when the undeclared income is below €2,500, and tax plus increase can never exceed the undeclared income. No increase applies either when the failure was due to circumstances beyond your control.

Administrative fine (article 445). From €50 for a first offence without bad faith, rising to €1,250.

Neither the tax increase nor the fine is deductible.

The notice gives you one month

Before it assesses, the administration has to send you a notice stating why it is using the procedure, the amount it intends to tax and how it arrived at it. You have one month to reply in writing, and the administration should not assess before that month ends. The period can be extended for valid reasons, so ask in writing straight away if you need longer.

Reply within the month. A useful reply contains:

• The return, filed or attached, with the date you filed it
• The annual accounts and the trial balance behind them
• For any figure the notice relies on (VAT turnover, payroll), the costs and adjustments it leaves out
• If you claim good faith or circumstances beyond your control, what happened and the evidence for it

Without a reply, the assessment uses the figure in the notice.

Contesting the assessment

Once the assessment notice arrives, you have one year to file an objection, counted from the third working day after the date it was sent (article 371). The period was six months until the law of 20 November 2022, and older guides still say so.

The objection does not shift the burden of proof. Under article 352, an ex officio assessment stands unless you prove your actual taxable income, precisely and verifiably, or show that the administration fixed the base arbitrarily. Taking turnover from VAT returns while ignoring wage costs the administration knew about from the payroll forms has been held arbitrary. In practice, proving your income means producing the full accounts for the year.

How long the year stays open

A return filed on time can normally be assessed for three years from 1 January of the assessment year. With no return or a late one, the period is four years. The law of 18 December 2025 kept that four-year period and withdrew the six- and ten-year periods introduced in 2022, with effect from assessment year 2023. Fraud carries seven years.

For assessment year 2026, the administration has until the end of 2029 to assess a company that did not file.

Deadlines and extensions

The return is normally due by the last day of the seventh month after your closing date. The FPS Finance sometimes sets a later date, as it did for years closed between 31 December 2025 and 28 February 2026, so check each year's notice.

An extension is granted only for valid reasons or force majeure, and the request has to go in before the deadline passes.

Filing the annual accounts with the National Bank is a separate obligation with its own late fee. It does not discharge the tax return.

In Financica

A return filed on time avoids the procedure. Reports > Year-end close checks the year, and Reports > Corporate tax calculates the charge from your ledger. From there, Financica produces the .biztax file you upload to Biztax for a resident company's plain return, with the annual accounts and the general meeting minutes attached as annexes. A year that needs a section the builder does not cover is refused with the reason named, so you can bring in your accountant before the deadline.

If you are already late, the same pages give you the accounts and the return to file now, and the figures to answer a notice or support an objection. The guide to closing a Belgian financial year walks through the entries in order.

Sources

• Articles 342, §4, 351, 352, 371, 444 and 445 of the Income Tax Code 1992
• FPS Finance, Avis relatif à l'indexation automatique en matière d'impôts sur les revenus, exercice d'imposition 2026, table X: "Art. 342, § 4, al. 1er, Minimum des bénéfices imposables, 40.000, 49.300"
• Article 182, §2/1 and §2/2 of the royal decree implementing the CIR 92, inserted by the royal decree of 29 July 2019
• Cass. 22 May 2014 on carried-forward losses against profits fixed under article 342 (commentary)
• Circular 2025/C/49 on the programme law of 18 July 2025 and article 444
• Circular 2026/C/1 on the assessment periods after the law of 18 December 2025
• Circular 2023/C/23 on the one-year objection period