Federal Act
on Value Added Tax
(Value Added Tax Act, VAT Act)

¹ The FTA may per­form audits of tax­able per­sons to the ex­tent this is ne­ces­sary to cla­ri­fy the cir­cum­stances. For this pur­pose, these per­sons must grant the FTA ac­cess to their ac­counts and re­lated re­ceipts. The same ap­plies to third parties ob­liged to provide in­form­a­tion un­der Art­icle 73 para­graph 2.

² The de­mand for and re­view of com­pre­hens­ive doc­u­ment­a­tion by the FTA is also re­garded as an audit.

³ Writ­ten no­tice must be giv­en of an audit. In jus­ti­fi­able and ex­cep­tion­al cases, no­ti­fic­a­tion of an audit may be waived.

⁴ The tax­able per­son may make a jus­ti­fied re­quest for an audit to be car­ried out. The audit must be per­formed with­in two years.

⁵ The audit must be con­cluded with­in 360 days of no­ti­fic­a­tion with an as­sess­ment no­tice; it states the amount of the tax claim in the peri­od audited.

⁶ Find­ings that con­cern third parties and that are made dur­ing an audit in ac­cord­ance with para­graphs 1–4 at any of the fol­low­ing in­sti­tu­tions may only be used for the pur­poses of col­lect­ing value ad­ded tax:

a.

the Swiss Na­tion­al Bank;

b.

a cent­ral mort­gage bond in­sti­tu­tion;

c.

a bank or sav­ings bank as defined in the Bank­ing Act of 8 Novem­ber 1934¹³⁷;

d.

a fin­an­cial in­sti­tu­tion as defined in the Fin­an­cial In­sti­tu­tions Act of 15 June 2018¹³⁸;

e.

a fin­an­cial mar­ket in­fra­struc­ture as defined in the Fin­an­cial Mar­ket In­fra­struc­ture Act of 19 June 2015¹³⁹.¹⁴⁰

⁷ Pro­fes­sion­al secrecy in ac­cord­ance with the Bank­ing Act, the Fin­an­cial In­sti­tu­tions Act and the Fin­an­cial Mar­ket In­fra­struc­ture Act must be pre­served.¹⁴¹