This blog was last updated on September 23, 2019

In a previous post we informed that Peru has announced a radical change to its centralized e-invoicing framework turning it into a distributed one, whereby the tax authority SUNAT would delegate the clearance function to so-called Operators of Electronic Services (OSE).
Recently SUNAT published draft legislation that provides technical and legal insight into this new OSE-model; below we share some highlights.

Taxpayers will be required to use the services of one or more OSEs when clearing their electronic fiscal documents, or the document will be invalid. The OSE will return a signed electronic time-stamped proof of reception, stating acceptance or rejection. The currently authorized clearance brokers, called PSEs, will no longer be able to work as intermediaries towards SUNAT but will have to connect to an OSE operator.

Different from today, taxpayers will not need to archive outbound invoices as this will be handled by the tax authority; archive obligation on inbound documents will remain.

On the technical side, a new version of UBL is introduced (2.1) and will co-exist with the current version 2.0 until end of this year, after which only UBL 2.1 will be allowed. To facilitate migration, OSE operators must support the current SUNAT API for clearance to avoid new investments for taxpayers and PSEs.

From an inbound perspective, the draft is not complete as to validation of received e-invoices, but only addresses the possibility manual validation at SUNAT’s portal; will today’s automated validation function survive? The SUNAT validation service is currently only partial and doesn’t validate the digital signature. It is therefore unclear how taxpayers will be able to conduct complete validation in a multi-operator scenario without the support of a regulated validation service that OSE operators could provide, and which is missing in today’s draft.