What is SAF-T?

SAF-T — Standard Audit File for Tax — is an OECD-designed export format that hands a tax authority a company’s accounting records as one standardised electronic file instead of a shoebox of reports. In Romania it arrives under the name D406, the return through which companies transmit that file to ANAF, the Romanian tax authority. What travels inside is substantial: general ledger entries, issued and received invoices, payments, inventory movements and fixed assets, all mapped onto a structure the authority specifies down to the individual field. The obligation was phased in by taxpayer category — large first, then medium, then small — with monthly or quarterly filing depending on the company’s VAT period, so a foreign owner of a Romanian subsidiary should assume it applies and confirm the frequency with the accountant rather than the other way round. Two consequences turn this into a systems question rather than a paperwork question. First, late or malformed filings are penalised. Second, and more lasting, the authority runs automated risk analytics over the submitted data: an inconsistency between what the inventory module says and what the ledger says stops being internal untidiness and becomes a visible signal at the tax office. A properly configured ERP produces D406 at the press of a button; a badly mapped one produces a week of manual reconciliation every single month.