The legal background for digital authentication is provided by Act No 2001/XXXV on electronic signatures, which introduced the concept of the "electronic signature authentication service" (or "authentication service" for short).
The purpose of e-signatures is to allow documents (contracts, declarations, invoices, etc.) which are typically produced electronically to be authenticated in digital form, in order to avoid the need to print these documents, to authenticate them with a hand-written signature, to send them by mail or fax, to store them on paper for a long period of time, etc. By omitting these steps, documents will be authenticated digitally, i.e., with the use of electronic signatures, which is beneficial in several ways:
- this will greatly reduce our costs,
- this will speed up the delivery of documents,
- this will automate the processing of documents,
- this greatly simplifies storage and retrieval.
Who can use electronic signatures:
- natural persons,
- legal persons,
- bodies without legal personality.
In order to have an electronic signature, one must apply for a so-called digital certificate from a Certification Authority (CA). The CA will verify the identity of the applicant when issuing the certificate, as the CA needs to be able to credibly verify who the electronic signature belongs to.
The easiest way to understand a digital certificate is to think of it as an electronic ID card for the signatory, which identifies who the electronic signature actually belongs to.
To put it a little more precisely, a digital certificate is an electronic document that provides credible evidence of the association between the signatory's signature key and the control key (a pair of private and public keys).
In general, electronic signatures can be used in electronic communications, business processes, and any other area of administration, especially as documents are already typically written in electronic form.
Digitally authenticating documents can relieve us of the need to print, hand-sign, mail, fax, store, and bind multiple copies of documents, which is quite costly.
However, in addition to the above, we would like to show you some practical uses which are already available in our country and which take advantage of the benefits of electronic signatures:
- authentic electronic administration in public and administrative matters
- authentic contracting and communication with corporate suppliers and customers
- secure communication within the company
- electronic invoicing
- electronic commerce
- authenticated banking communication
- production of large volumes of authentic documents.
Digital authentication of documents will become more and more common in business in the near future, as companies’ IT readiness will increasingly allow them to automate and digitalise certain tasks, saving a lot of money. One of these areas is corporate invoicing, where everything is already in place to create and send invoices to customers electronically.
The current legislation does not contain any mandatory requirement for using electronic signatures and time stamps with invoicing software.
Although using electronic signatures is not mandatory for e-invoicing under current legislation, it is a beneficial and effective way to ensure the authenticity of invoices.
Its most common application and purpose is to ensure the integrity of the content of the invoice issued (i.e., that the invoice was actually issued by the taxable person who is required to issue it by the VAT Act), so that the invoice issuer and recipient no longer need to prove this (e.g., by logical or other means).
An additional advantage from the invoice recipient's perspective is that proving the appropriateness of the e-signature is relatively easy during the invoice acceptance stage with the mandatory business verification process that ensures an appropriate audit trail. This then makes it much easier to perform the necessary technical validation step.
In addition, e-signatures are of particular importance for archiving: e-signatures are required for almost all applicable electronic archiving methods – if an e-signature is provided when the invoice is issued, it can save time and money during archiving.
There is, however, a financial disadvantage to the general use of e-signatures: namely, the fees involved. However, some part of these costs can be saved, since, as mentioned above, the use of e-signatures is not required for invoicing.