Frequently asked questions

Road haulage companies and public passenger transport companies can benefit, in certain countries of the European Union and under certain conditions, from a partial refund of the excise duty paid on their supplies of professional diesel ^(*).

To this end, refund applications must be submitted in due form to the competent authority using a special form.

Fuel Tax Pro offers a complete service to automate most of the process of excise refund you may be entitled to, from the collection of supply data and supporting documents to the generation of specific forms to be submitted to the administration.

^(*) Gas oil falling within CN code 2710 19 41 with a sulphur content not exceeding 10 mg/kg.

At present, only excise duty refund claims to the Belgian authorities are covered by the Fuel Tax Pro service, both for EU resident and non-resident companies. However, it is planned to extend the coverage of the Fuel Tax Pro service to other EU countries that allow partial refunds of excise duty, such as France, Italy and Spain.

As a result, the legal rules of eligibility and admissibility covered in these FAQs are currently based solely on Belgian law.

In general, all companies established in a European Union country that own or use vehicles that meet the following characteristics:

• Vehicles providing taxi service for a fee; or
• Vehicles hired with a driver for a fee, provided that these vehicles are recognised as suitable for the transport of disabled persons; or
• Vehicles used for the carriage of goods for their own account or for the account of others, with a maximum authorised mass equal to or greater than 7.5 tonnes; or
• Vehicles carrying passengers with more than 8 seats (not including the driver), with a maximum mass of more than 5 tonnes.

Certain vehicles, such as those used for waste collection, those used by the armed forces or certain public administration vehicles, although meeting the above-mentioned conditions, remain excluded from the excise refund procedure. We invite you to take note of articles 429 and following of the program law of 27 December 2004, or to contact the Customs and Excises Administration, to ensure that your vehicles can benefit from the refund procedure.

The reimbursement is granted to the person who carries out the concerned transport. In general this is the owner of the vehicle. If an eligible vehicle is nevertheless made available to a person other than the person in whose name the vehicle is registered with the D.I.V. (e.g. in the case of rental or leasing), the reimbursement may well be granted to that other person. However, the rental or leasing contract must be presented to the competent authority upon request.

In order to benefit from the partial reimbursement of the excise duty on professional diesel, you must first have an authorisation for energy products and electricity for product code 22. See the website finances.belgium.be, under the tab “Excise duties”, sub-tab “Application forms” to download the application form for authorisation.

You must then file proper excise refund claims in accordance with the guidelines imposed by the Customs and Excise Authority.

Fuel Tax Pro allows you to automate the refund of your excise duties on professional diesel in Belgium.

To do this, Fuel Tax Pro enables:

• to easily collect the information of your drivers’ fill-ups via the mobile application Fuel Tax Pro;
• manually enter fill-ups or fill-up invoices that cannot be read automatically by the Fuel Tax Pro mobile application;
• to collect, store and archive supporting documents (or copies thereof) associated with your fillings and claim forms (for validation purposes and internal controls);
• to check and possibly correct the collected fill-ups data;
• generate your excise refund application forms on demand;
• to introduce new complementary fill-up data, relating to previous declaration periods, in the event of omissions or delays in encoding;
• adjust your lists of vehicles, drivers and fuel suppliers as your business evolves.

You can also easily monitor your excise refund application forms, fuel supplies and consumption, Fuel Tax Pro invoices, and much more.

Fuel Tax Pro allows the collection of information on the supply of professional diesel in Belgium from both public service stations and from own storage tanks.

a. Pump readings

Fuel Tax Pro invoices monthly in arrears, per vehicle and for each vehicle that has registered at least one supply of professional diesel during the past month, a degressive percentage of the amounts of excise duty to be recovered, with a fixed minimum of €10.00 excluding VAT. Vehicles that have not registered any supply during the month are not invoiced.

For billing purposes, vehicles are first sorted in descending order of monthly diesel supply and then invoiced at declining billing rates, from the most supplied vehicles to the least supplied vehicles. The excise amounts to be recovered used for billing purposes are identical to the amounts shown at the end of each month on your Fuel Tax Pro excise refund claim form.

As an example, for a fleet of seven vehicles with a total monthly supply of 750, 1,000, 0, 500, 1,250, 1,500 and 250 liter(s) respectively, at the end of the concerned month, the Fuel Tax Pro billing will be as follows:

• Vehicle 1 – 1,500 liters:
  Excise to be recovered^{(*) (€371.43), 8% (€29.71), Billing (€29.71) ;}
• Vehicle 2 – 1,250 liters:
  Excise to be recovered^(*) (€309.53), 8% (€24.76), Billing (€24.75) ;
• Vehicle 3 – 1,000 liters:
  Excise to be recovered^(*) (€247.62), 8% (€19.81), Billing (€19.81) ;
• Vehicle 4 – 750 liters:
  Excise to be recovered^(*) (€185.72), 8% (€14.86), Billing (€14.86) ;
• Vehicle 5 – 500 liters:
  Excise to be recovered^(*) (123,81 €), 8% (9,90 €), Billing (10,00 €) ;
• Vehicle 6 – 250 liters:
  Excise to be recovered^(*) (61,91 €), 7% (4,33 €), Billing (10,00 €) ;
• Vehicle 7 – 0 liter:
  Excise to be recovered^(*) (0 €), 7% (0 €), Billing (0 €) ;
• TOTAL BILLING :
  €109.14 (Excise to be recovered^(*) = €1,300.01).

b. Invoices (fuel cards, tanks, etc.)

Fuel Tax Pro invoices monthly in arrears, per invoice, 5% of the excise amounts to be recovered with a minimum flat rate of € 10.00 excl.

^(*) The amounts of excise duty to be recovered have been calculated on the basis of the excise duty refund rate applied in Belgium in 2021, i.e.: €0.24762/litre.

The Fuel Tax Pro subscription process begins with a registration process to create a new user account linked to your company, and then to register all the mandatory data required to activate your subscription.

Once this step is completed, you can activate your subscription via an activation button provided to that end in the Fuel Tax Pro platform.

Company name, identification number (CBE) and VAT number, registered office address, contact details, bank details and the company’s energy and electricity authorisation number for product code 22 (ENERLEC).

Once your subscription is activated, you can take full advantage of the services offered by the Fuel Tax Pro platform and mobile app.

If you haven’t already done so, you’ll have the opportunity to populate your user account with your company’s operational information, including your fuel suppliers, drivers, and vehicles. You’ll then need to verify that each of your drivers has the Fuel Tax Pro mobile fuel collection app properly installed and activated on their phone, and then ensure that your drivers are consistently using it every time they fill up.

The fill-up data collected by the Fuel Tax Pro mobile app will be automatically transmitted to your user account and will be available for use when generating your next excise refund claim form.

Before the end of each month, Fuel Tax Pro will ask you to check one last time the validity of the collected data before consolidating it. Once this check has been completed and the fill-up data consolidated, you will be able to generate your excise refund claim form, which you will need to sign and send to the Customs and Excise Authority.

Yes, this is possible via the Fuel Tax Pro platform. You can proceed at any time, during the month of collection of fill-up data, to verify and correct them, whether they have been encoded manually or automatically by the Fuel Tax Pro mobile application. This operation is however limited in time and cannot exceed the month of data collection.

On the 5^th day of the following month, starting at 10 p.m., Fuel Tax Pro automatically locks (consolidates) all fill-up data stored in the previous month in the system, so that it can no longer be edited.

This data lock is essential to ensure that your subscription is invoiced correctly and that the information on your excise recovery application forms is consistent with the fill-up data recorded in the Fuel Tax Pro system.

It is therefore important to validate your fill-up data before 10 p.m. the 5^th day of the following month, a task that Fuel Tax Pro makes as easy as possible by clearly displaying copies of supporting documents for each editable fill-up data.

As your full tank data is consolidated on a monthly basis, you will need to generate twelve (12) excise refund claim forms per year. However, your forms are generated on demand as soon as at least one month of consolidated full tank data is available. Each time a new generation request is made, the Fuel Tax Pro system examines the list of available consolidated full tanks (not included in a previous form) and produces a new excise refund claim form per month with all this data. Once the return(s) has been filed, the full tanks included in the return(s) will no longer be available for the generation of subsequent forms.

Yes, you can manually enter into the Fuel Tax Pro platform fill-up data for periods prior to the current month, or even prior to the reference period of your next form. This data will be included in your next form as a supplementary form.

You alone bear this responsibility and are solely responsible for the accuracy of the excise refund claim forms that you submit to the Customs and Excises Administration. Fuel Tax Pro cannot guarantee the refund of the amounts on your forms, nor can it assume the outcome of the tax audits conducted by the administration in relation to your excise refund claims.

Mollie is the online payment platform chosen by Fuel Tax Pro to guarantee the confidentiality of your financial data and to automate the payment of your monthly invoices.

We do not store or have access to any of your financial data on our systems.

The billing frequency is monthly. As such, monthly statements are issued in arrears on the fifth day of the month following the provision of the service.

ClearPriority owns the Fuel Tax Pro brand and is the service provider.

The payment period for the Fuel Tax Pro service is ten (10) calendar days from the date the monthly statement issued by Fuel Tax Pro is sent.

You normally don’t have to do anything, payments are automated via the Mollie online payment platform which receives monthly statements to be settled on the fifth day following their issue.

However, if your payment data has not yet been entered or if a payment failure is reported by Mollie, your intervention will be required.

In this case, you will have five (5) days to update your payment data, otherwise your access to the Fuel Tax Pro platform will be temporarily suspended while you rectify the situation.

Access to the Fuel Tax Pro platform is automatically suspended when payment of an overdue invoice cannot be honored. This may occur from time to time when (a) Fuel Tax Pro is waiting for your payment data to settle your first invoice, or (b) the payment data you previously provided has become obsolete and requires an update from you.

You can easily rectify the situation by clicking on the link to update your payment information that Fuel Tax Pro makes available on your user account homepage or in its email notifications.

When your access to the Fuel Tax Pro platform is suspended, you lose access to the platform but are still able to collect and populate your user account with fill-up data. You will not lose any information that would deprive you of part of the excise refunds you may be entitled to.

When access to the Fuel Tax Pro platform is suspended, you have until the last day of the month to rectify the situation. After this period, your access to all Fuel Tax Pro services will be blocked.

Access to all Fuel Tax Pro services is automatically blocked when the payment of an overdue invoice has not been honoured at the end of the period of suspension of access to the Fuel Tax Pro platform.

When access to Fuel Tax Pro services is blocked, you can easily rectify the situation by accessing the subscription section of the platform.

Once your payment information has been updated and your delinquent bill has been paid, your access to all Fuel Tax Pro services is immediately restored. The previously collected fuel information for the month during which your access to the Fuel Tax Pro platform was suspended will be consolidated and billed without surcharges or administrative fees at the next billing date.

When your access to Fuel Tax Pro services is blocked, you no longer have access to the Fuel Tax Pro platform and you can no longer collect and populate your user account with fill-up data. This means that you will lose some of your fill-up data, which will deprive you of some of the excise refunds you may be entitled to.

Your access to Fuel Tax Pro services will remain blocked until you update your payment information and honor the payment request(s) pending settlement.