A precise date, an emergency plan, and an extension of the balance sheet deadlines are needed, so that digitalization does not remain a tool of punishment, but serves what it was created for: to help those who produce value in this country...
From the Albanian Association of Accountants and Financiers
If one were looking for a perfect example of how a technological advance can turn into a bureaucratic nightmare, January 2026 in Albania would be the ideal case study. What started as a promise of modernization and convenience through the “SelfCare” platform has now become an insurmountable barrier that is choking businesses and driving accounting professionals to exhaustion. This is not just another technical glitch, but a silent collapse of the entire nervous system of our economy.
It all starts with the business identity, which no longer exists without the blessing of servers. Imagine an entrepreneur who opens the doors of a new store, completes the registrations at the Central Business District and is ready to start work, but finds himself facing a virtual wall. Without the functioning of the central platform, he cannot generate the country code of the activity or the operator code. He is, de jure, a legal entity, but de facto, a shadow that cannot sell any product without violating the law. This blocking of fiscal identity does not spare existing businesses either, which find themselves unable to validate electronic certificates or change personnel at the cash registers, being forced to operate in a dangerous gray area.
In this climate of uncertainty, the problem becomes even more technical and dangerous during the daily invoicing process. Many businesses that use software solutions are noticing that invoices issued are being issued without the unique NIVF code, appearing as unfiscalized or with transmission errors. According to the legislation in force, in cases where there is a connection interruption or communication failure, the business has a window of only 48 hours to try to re-fiscal these documents. However, when the SelfCare platform remains inaccessible for days, this 48-hour deadline becomes a noose that tightens around the business's neck. Without the possibility of receiving a confirmation from the system, invoices remain in a suspended state, exposing entities to massive penalties, even though the error is completely beyond their control.
The situation becomes even more dramatic for entities that manage large volumes of automatic billing, such as telephone, energy or water utility companies. For these operators, the process has become a real “black box”. Without access to SelfCare, they have no way to reconcile their internal systems with the central platform. They find themselves in an information blackout where they do not know exactly how many invoices have actually been issued, how many of them have been successfully fiscalized or – even worse – whether the same transmission has been fiscalized twice due to repeated attempts by the system. This chaos in large volumes not only distorts the sales books, but creates a financial inaccuracy with incalculable reconciliation costs in the future.
On the other side of the coin, the purchasing process is becoming a time trap. The SelfCare platform is where entities must accept or reject invoices that come to them from suppliers. The inability to access the system means the inability to exercise this control. The risk here is legal and financial: if this blockage lasts beyond the 11th of the following month, the system will automatically consider these invoices as accepted. Businesses thus risk accepting incorrect, inflated or false invoices, losing the right to contest and being burdened with unfair financial and tax obligations.
The pain of this blockage also deeply affects the category of self-employed individuals without employees. For them, the collapse of the portal is a total cessation of activity, since without a software solution, they are tied to the functioning of the site. Meanwhile, at customs, importers are seeing how the supply chain is broken because the import self-invoicing process has become hostage to inaccessible servers.
As if the paralysis of the day were not enough, this January also carries with it the weight of the closing of the 2025 financial year. This is the month where accountants must reconcile every penny of the year we left behind, but their main work tool is out of order. Reconciling sales and confirming purchases between what the software reports and what the tax server has “devoured” has become an impossible mission. Without this clear overview, the drafting of Financial Statements turns into an exercise in guesswork, violating the basic principle of truthfulness.
The Albanian Association of Accountants and Financiers has raised its voice, demanding not only the recognition of this situation as a force majeure, but above all, transparency. Business cannot operate with the hope that the system will “maybe” return tomorrow. A precise date, an emergency plan and an extension of the balance sheet deadlines are needed, so that digitalization does not remain a means of punishment, but serves what it was created for: to help those who produce value in this country./Monitor.al/
