November Peak Filing period
There are over 52,000 companies with an annual return date of 30th September and a filing deadline of 25 November. If you are filing an annual return in respect of one of these companies, you are requested to ensure that your correctly completed annual return is delivered to the CRO on-time. The only way of doing this is by filing online. Please allow enough time to carry this out in advance of your specific deadline, including the delivery of the signature page.
Public Holidays
NOTE: Where the 56 day filing period expires on a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday, the 56 day period is extended to the next working day.
eFiling is Mandatory
Mandatory electronic filing for the submission of an Annual Return and its associated financial statements applies to all Irish companies. You may get a warning or error when efiling on CORE. Warnings will not prevent you filing your annual return. The warnings are alerting you to the fact that information provided on the B1 does not match the CRO records. However, if you receive an error this must be corrected before the annual return can be submitted. You will not be permitted to submit an annual return with errors.
Electronic Payments
To facilitate the implementation of PSD2, a European law which came into force recently to make it more secure for consumers to make electronic payments online, CRO had to make changes to our payment page, by adding 6 new fields. We are aware that some Core users have been having difficulties with these new fields and are encountering errors when trying to pay online.
Please ensure that you fill in details in all 6 fields (Address 1, Address 2, City, Postcode, Country and Phone Number) to avoid errors and proceed with payment. The inputting of some special characters into the fields will cause errors and prevent the credit card entry screen from loading, for instance the phone number field does not accept brackets “(“ “)”. Any non-alphabetic/non-numeric characters apart from quotes and hyphens for the addresses should be avoided.
The current CRO online systems tend to work better with the Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome browsers so we would advise customers to use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome where possible when e-filing.
If you experience issues e-filing, changing to an alternative web browser may rectify the issue. Also be aware of the high volumes of users accessing the system at the same time and you may need to try again.
If this does not resolve the issue, then contact the CRO: Telephone 00 353 (0) 1 804 5200 or annualreturns@cro.ie.
With regards to electronic filing you can contact the CRO Helpdesk at support@cro-helpdesk.cloud.gov.ie.
Correct email address
Companies and Presenters should ensure that they provide the correct email addresses, one that is monitored regularly, to ensure they are alerted when their documents are sent back as they no longer receive a letter or documents by post. Provisions should be put in place that prevent emails from the CRO going to Spam or being blocked.
Upload Accounts
The B1 (Annual Return form) is not deemed submitted until after the payment stage and has to be paid for on CORE within 56 days of the annual return date. The Financial Statements and the Signature page each as a seperate single PDF, must be uploaded before the submission can be paid for.
Payment must be online
The filing fee for an B1 is €20. Remember that if you have chosen to pay by credit card, payment will be taken immediately and is NON REFUNDABLE (as we cannot store card details). If you would prefer to pay by customer account, payment will not be deducted from your customer account until the signature page is received and processed. Please see Open a Customer Account Online page.
If an annual return is filed late, late filing penalties apply and, where applicable, the company also loses its entitlement to claim audit exemption in the following two years.
CRO account holders
CRO Account holders should ensure that there is sufficient money in their account to cover the transaction before submitting their documents.
Signature Page
The B1 form can be signed digitally using a Revenue Online Service (ROS) certificate or can be signed using a signature page. The signature page is available at the end of the B1 form and has to be submitted electronically and must be printed, signed and uploaded to CORE to allow payment within the 56 days. Failure to submit the return to the CRO on time can result in late filing penalties and loss of audit exemption.
Since 1st April 2018, B1’s are automatically rejected where the B1 signature page or overall certificate is not signed, if it has only one signature or where the financial statements have not been uploaded.
Important points to note when filing a B1 form