KSeF penalties pushed to 2028? The bill moves the fines, but 1 January 2027 still changes things for an office's clients

The Headline Is Half the Story

Since mid-October the Polish trade press has been running some version of "no KSeF penalties until 2028". It's partly true. On 20 October 2026 the government sent the Sejm a bill amending the VAT Act and the 2023 KSeF act. It's print no. 3245. The first reading was held the next day, at sitting 67, and the bill went to the Public Finance Committee. Its core is two lines. The penalty provisions in art. 106ni(1)–(3) and (5)–(7) take effect on 1 January 2028, not 1 January 2027. And the amending act itself enters into force on 31 December 2026.

Two things follow, and both matter to an accounting office.

First, it's a bill. It still needs the Sejm, the Senate, the President's signature and publication in Dziennik Ustaw, all in about nine weeks. A bill that relieves taxpayers usually gets through. But if it slips past 31 December, the current wording applies and the penalties start on 1 January 2027. Plan for both.

Second, the bill only moves the fines. Everything else scheduled for 1 January 2027 stays where it was. The justification says so in so many words: from 1 January 2027 invoices can no longer be issued from cash registers, and the exemption for taxpayers invoicing up to 10,000 zł gross a month ends.

What the Penalties Are, in Numbers

Art. 106ni covers three kinds of breach: not issuing a structured invoice in KSeF when you had to, issuing an invoice during a KSeF outage or in offline mode that doesn't follow the published schema, and not sending such an invoice to KSeF on time. The head of the tax office imposes the penalty by decision, payable within 14 days of delivery. The amounts are ceilings:

Invoice	Ceiling
12,300 zł gross, 2,300 zł VAT, issued as a PDF instead of in KSeF	up to 2,300 zł (100% of the VAT)
5,000 zł from a VAT-exempt seller, no VAT shown	up to 935 zł (18.7% of the amount due)

Now take a typical small client: a VAT-exempt sole trader issuing six invoices a month for 9,000 zł in total, who has never logged into KSeF because the 10,000 zł exemption covered them. Under the current wording, every one of those invoices issued outside KSeF from January exposes them to up to 18.7%, which on 9,000 zł is up to 1,683 zł a month. Under the bill, the same client pays no fine in 2027. That doesn't mean nothing happens.

The bill also fixes an obvious error: it removes invoices issued during a total KSeF failure (art. 106ne(3)) from the penalty list. Those invoices are never sent to KSeF afterwards, so penalising them never made sense.

What the Tax Administration Says It Will Do in 2027

This is the paragraph in the justification I'd underline for every office. Most taxpayers have been fully in KSeF since 2026 without penalties, so the Ministry writes that ignoring KSeF in 2027 "won't go without a reaction" from KAS. The sequence it describes is: first a reminder of the obligation. If that doesn't work, a check under art. 272 of the Tax Ordinance (czynności sprawdzające) of whether not using KSeF leads to unreliable settlement of output and input VAT.

In practice that means a client who keeps sending PDFs in 2027 won't get a fine, but may get a letter and then a request for documents. Both land on the office's desk. The question will be whether the sales in JPK_V7 match what the client invoiced, and whether the buyers' input VAT is backed by proper invoices. A year without fines is a year with questions.

What Still Changes on 1 January 2027

I covered the purchase side in detail in the post on documents outside KSeF: no more invoices from cash registers, receipts with a NIP up to 450 zł stop counting as simplified invoices, and the 10,000 zł exemption ends. The bill doesn't change any of it.

There's one more 2027 change that gets less attention: the KSeF number in the payment. From 1 January 2027, when an active VAT payer pays an active VAT payer for a structured invoice by bank transfer or direct debit, the KSeF number of that invoice should go into the payment title. Card, BLIK and cash payments aren't covered. Sources disagree on details, such as the split payment field and how to pay several invoices in one transfer. I haven't found a penalty tied directly to this rule, and I won't invent one. But it changes what ends up in the bank statement, and the office will feel it.

For the office, that's actually good news. A KSeF number in the transfer title is the cleanest key there is for matching a payment to an invoice, better than an invoice number typed by hand. The matching rules I described in the post on automating bank statement booking get a new first rule.

The November–December Client List

Whatever happens to print 3245, these checks are the same. I'd run them once in November and once in mid-December:

1. Clients still issuing sales invoices outside KSeF. Compare each client's sales register for September and October with the invoices actually visible in KSeF on the seller side. A client with sales invoices and zero KSeF numbers is almost certainly using the 10,000 zł exemption. From January they need a tool that issues in KSeF and someone who knows how to log in. I described the comparison itself in the post on sales invoices in KSeF.
2. Clients who invoice from a cash register. Shops, restaurants, workshops. From January a business customer who wants an invoice gets it from KSeF, not from the register. That's a process change at the counter, not in the office.
3. Permissions for newly onboarded clients. Every client who enters KSeF in January needs to grant the office access. That's 10–20 new entries in the KSeF permission register for a typical office, all in the same week.
4. Offline invoices sent late. In 2026 a late offline24 invoice costs nothing. Whether that changes on 1 January 2027 or 1 January 2028 depends on the bill. Either way, the habit should go now. Details in the post on offline24.
5. Payment exports. Clients who pay suppliers from an ERP payment file or bank templates: does the KSeF number reach the transfer title, or does the ERP still put the invoice number there?

Where an Agent Fits

None of this is hard. It just has to be done for every client, and November is when nobody has spare hours. An agent does the boring half. Every night it reads the client's sales register and the KSeF metadata of issued invoices with the office's credentials. It lists clients with sales and no KSeF numbers, clients whose purchase side shows cash-register invoices from their own counterparties, and in January the outgoing transfers without a KSeF number in the title. Each item comes with the client, the number and the reason. It doesn't email clients and doesn't change anything in the ERP.

The accountant gets one list per client on a Monday morning, not forty separate investigations.

One Number for This Week

Count the clients that issued sales invoices in October but have no KSeF number on any of them. That's the size of your January. If it's more than three or four, start the conversations now. Whatever the Sejm does with print 3245, those clients still have to issue in KSeF from January.

Want to know the number without counting by hand? Send me one client's anonymised October sales register and I'll show you what the comparison with KSeF turns up.