Check your Copyright levy invoices

After cumulation of a large number of highly deficient invoices of collecting societies in several countries in the last year as well as for the first months of 2012, many invoices are to be rejected. Therefore K&L recommends to clients and companies who manage reporting and payments on their own to compare and check the reported sales figures, applicable tariffs and categorization of their products with the data of the invoices of the collecting societies. K&L has received numerous and sometimes completely incorrect invoices of collecting societies for reporting of sales figures for 2011 and 2012. The societies are still struggling with a clear statement or comment on that.

All this is based on the meanwhile established and very complex regulations in all countries: There are, for example, for “any kind of integrated or removable storage device”, i. e. memory cards in Austria 30 different tariffs within 4 different tariff ranges, depending on the contract situation of the company, use, storage capacity etc. The appropriate tariffing for some reprography devices depend on up to nine characteristics! It requires a lot of knowledge in the field to classify each single device correctly. That means, on the one hand the correct categorization of the products and equipment, and the correct application of tariffs on the other hand. However, also tax rates, discounts, deadlines and special applications, like exports, have to be considered. These evaluations might be very elaborate, especially when detailed obligations, including tariffs, contracts, forms and further information are not instantly available.