How the solution works

How the solution works

The solution enables to transmit tax data to the German tax authorities. In particular, it contains the following features:

• Validating of requests and their content

• Generating XML filings in ELSTER data format

• Encrypting and decrypting of the data

• Transmitting of filings

• Processing the information received

• Generating official transmission protocols

• Logging of transmission process operations

• Conversion of the character encoding from ISO-8859-15 to UTF-8 (especially for tax years before 2020)

• Saving the official transmission protocols

Before a transfer to the IT systems of the tax authorities is performed, validation takes place using official rules in order to eliminate formal errors in the data. If the validation is successful, the data is sent to the ELSTER acceptance server of the tax administration. The acceptance servers send back a result as XML. The solution creates the transmission protocol based on this XML (for tax declarations) and store relevant data (for all transmissions).

Structure of the solution

The solution consists of the following parts:

• API (based on Laravel)

• peric (PHP with FFI for intergration with the ERiC libraries)

• SQL (database)

The ERiC libraries of the tax authorities are integrated into peric. Use cases for the requests are:

• Validating call usecase: validate No transmission to the tax authorities

• Sending call usecase: send Transmission to the tax authorities