"I have a Slovak address card, so I don’t have to pay taxes in Hungary…" "I just have to make sure not to spend more than 183 days at home". "I’m a digital nomad, I don’t pay taxes anywhere." Many similar misconceptions circulate in Hungary regarding the rules of tax residence. However, tax regulations are “much smarter” than that and those who follow false illusions may even be exposed to criminal liability.

Recently, a Hungarian court accepted the right of a taxpayer to recover VAT on a bad debt where the VAT claim has already elapsed. The court made it clear that the statute of limitations does not count from the day of the original invoice but from the date when the debt became definitively irrecoverable. This decision may give hope to taxpayers in many pending cases.

The healthcare emergency situation has accelerated the digitisation of tasks and processes in a wide range of areas. Enforcement proceedings based on notarial deeds are no exception, where an electronic procedure became mandatory a few months ago. The only question is how long the signature itself will still need to be in writing.

To this day, the domestic legal system has remained silent on how contracts concluded by email should be treated. However, legislation recently adopted in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic explicitly allows communication via email between a company and its private-individual members. Could this be the first step towards a more comprehensive legal acceptance of emails?

While there were still as many as 60 types of tax in Hungary five years ago, this number was reduced to 54 by the end of last year. This process was interrupted by the recent introduction of crisis taxes. It remains to be seen whether this trend will now be reversed.

With in-store shopping often relegated to a secondary role, online forms of trading have come to the fore of late. Nowadays, merchants that don’t adopt web commerce solutions alongside or instead of their physical stores can find themselves at a distinct disadvantage in the market. It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that besides implementing various IT developments and having to organise home deliveries, running a webshop requires some major preparatory work in the legal area as well.

Everything that used to be simple and straightforward when concluding or completing M&A transactions poses major challenges to market participants in today’s crisis circumstances. New legal and technical solutions have been designed to overcome these difficulties, some of which are expected to remain with us even after the crisis.

Panicking amid the health crisis, company managers can easily feel pressured to take some “seemingly obvious” legal or business measures to resolve their situation. However, these measures often involve serious legal risks and should be approached with caution.