Law-firm correspondence register after the NSA e-Tax Office ruling
A seven-judge NSA panel: a document in the e-Tax Office is served only when it is actually collected, not after 14 days on the account. Time limits run from the channel, the collection date and the address on the power of attorney.
On 26 August 2026 Infor.pl set out the consequences of a Supreme Administrative Court (NSA) judgment delivered on 3 August 2026 (case I FSK 1307/25, a seven-judge panel): merely placing a decision in a representative’s e-Tax Office account does not constitute service. The deemed-service rule in Article 150 of the Tax Ordinance — the same idea law firms know from two postal notices — does not extend to that portal. Service via the e-Tax Office is effective only on the day the document is actually collected. The burden of proving receipt lies with the authority.
For an advocate, legal adviser or tax adviser the judgment lands in the diary and on the file, not only in a case note. Time to appeal, to complain, to answer a request and often to complete the file runs from the date of service. If the firm counts fourteen days from a portal notification and nobody collected the document, the authority may have treated the matter as closed — and the NSA has now rejected that. If someone did collect it, the time of opening may be the date from which time runs, even where the power of attorney named a different address. That is why a law-firm correspondence register has to record the channel, the date the item appeared, the date it was actually collected, and the address on the power of attorney. Without that, the secretariat and the representative count from different days.
The NSA judgment of 3 August 2026 in case I FSK 1307/25
The case heard on 3 August 2026 began with a decision of the Head of a Customs and Tax Office dated 24 June 2024 on a company’s VAT for August to December 2013. The decision was sent the same day to the representative’s account — a tax adviser and advocate — in the e-Tax Office system. The representative did not collect it. The authority treated substitute service as completed after fourteen days (dated 8 July 2024). The company lodged an appeal only in November 2024, together with an application to restore the time limit, pointing out that the special power of attorney gave an ePUAP address. The Director of the Tax Administration Chamber found the time limit had been missed. The Provincial Administrative Court in Kraków (I SA/Kr 189/25, 24 April 2025) sided with the authority. The NSA quashed that judgment and the chamber’s order.
The ruling, as reported by Infor and Prawo.pl, comes down to three points. First, a representative’s consent to service on an e-Tax Office account — given under Article 35e of the National Revenue Administration Act — does not cancel the address named in the power of attorney. The authority may use the e-Tax Office, but that is a power, not the only route and not a hierarchy over Article 145 § 2 of the Ordinance. Second, Article 150 of the Ordinance contains a closed list of substitute-service cases. Deemed service for a document merely made available in the e-Tax Office is not on that list. The deemed-service rule must not be read expansively. Third, if the representative actually collects the document from the e-Tax Office, service is effective on the day of collection. Notification plus the passage of time is not enough. The burden of proof sits with the authority.
This is a judgment in a particular cassation appeal, given by seven judges, not a resolution with the force of a legal principle. Infor notes that it does not bind other panels in the way a resolution would, but panels will refer to it. One should not tell a client that “the Act forbids service via the e-Tax Office”. The Act — Article 144 § 1a of the Ordinance read with Article 35e of the NRA Act — still lists an account in the authority’s ICT system as a permitted method. The NSA did not close that channel. It limited the effect of non-collection. Judge Jan Rudowski, president of the Financial Chamber, said in court that he hoped the Ordinance amendment passed by the Sejm on 29 May 2026 would tidy the area. That amendment (Journal of Laws 2026, item 846) enters into force on 1 October 2026; according to PAP its core concerns, among other things, domestic MDR reporting and procedure, and it does not replace the e-Tax Office judgment. Until the statute is changed in so many words, a law firm works from the Ordinance and from this case.
The channels through which a document reaches the firm
In 2026 a representative does not have one inbox. There are several, each with its own rules. Advocates, legal advisers, tax advisers, restructuring advisers, patent attorneys and notaries have been required to use e-Delivery since 1 January 2025 — that is the Ministry of Digital Affairs timetable and Article 9(1) of the Electronic Delivery Act. That mailbox is tied to practising the profession and is entered in the Electronic Address Database. If the same lawyer also runs a company or a sole traders’ business, Biznes.gov.pl requires a separate mailbox for the firm. They must not be merged. The profession and the business are two addresses.
Alongside that sits the e-Tax Office: a natural person’s account to which the revenue administration may send correspondence after consent under Article 35e of the NRA Act. The NSA said that consent widens the channels but does not create a hierarchy. There is also whatever remains of ePUAP — from 1 January 2026 e-Delivery is the default means of communication between public bodies and non-public addressees, and deemed service from ePUAP to non-public parties has ceased unless a special provision says otherwise. Courts, tribunals, enforcement officers and the public prosecutor have until 1 October 2029 to move to e-Delivery. Until then the firm still collects summonses from the Courts Information Portal, from ePUAP where a court still uses it, and from the post. Paper has not gone. The public hybrid service prints the letter when the addressee has no mailbox.
- e-Delivery for a profession of public trust (ADE in the BAE, since 1 January 2025)
- e-Delivery for the representative’s company or sole traders’ business, if that activity is separate from the profession
- the e-Tax Office account — actual collection, no fourteen-day deemed service
- the electronic address named in the power of attorney (ePUAP or ADE), binding on the authority in that matter
- the Courts Information Portal and paper or hybrid post, until the courts move to e-Delivery
A firm that “checks the post” but in practice opens one mailbox in the morning does not know whether a decision is sitting in another — a decision from which the authority is already counting a second week, or, after the NSA judgment, a decision that has not yet been served because nobody collected it. Both states are dangerous. In the first, a time limit is lost. In the second, the authority may believe it has served, and the firm learns of the dispute when enforcement is under way. The register does not replace official systems. It shows which system, when, and whether anyone opened the item.
When a document is served: e-Delivery, the e-Tax Office and paper
This is where the operational error is largest. People in the firm say “electronic, so fourteen days like a postal notice”. The Electronic Delivery Act does know that mechanism — but only for e-Delivery. Article 41(1)(3) of that Act provides that a proof of receipt is issued after 14 days from the arrival of correspondence sent by a public body to a non-public address, if the addressee has not collected it. Article 42(2): the correspondence is then treated as served on the day following those 14 days, counted from the arrival date shown in the proof of receipt. The Ministry of Digital Affairs repeats this in its FAQ: after 14 days a letter from an authority to a citizen’s or firm’s ADE is treated as served even if the addressee has not opened it. Entry in the BAE is equivalent to a request that public bodies serve correspondence at that address. A firm that has an ADE and does not log in for a fortnight does face deemed service. That is current law, not commentary.
In the e-Tax Office — according to the NSA — that deemed service does not exist. Article 150 of the Ordinance does not mention making a document available on an e-Tax Office account. The court refused to read in an analogy with a paper notice. The result: a document sitting in the account that nobody has collected remains unserved. The authority should use the address on the power of attorney. If the representative does collect it, the date of service is the day of collection, not the day it was dropped into the portal and not the fourteenth day. That distinction has to sit on every register line, because it decides whether you count 14 days from arrival, 14 days from opening, or do not start time at all.
Paper stays on the classic path: a notice, a second notice, deemed service after the holding period, from the list in Article 150 of the Ordinance or Article 44 of the Code of Administrative Procedure, depending on the procedure. The public hybrid service is still a letter, only printed by the operator. In court proceedings, until October 2029, e-Delivery is not yet the courts’ exclusive channel. The Information Portal, service by an enforcement officer and registered post live alongside the ADE. A firm whose calendar has one column called “date in”, with no column for “channel rule”, will count court time limits as if they were tax time limits, and tax time limits as if they were e-Delivery. After 3 August 2026 that is no longer pedantry. It is the difference between an appeal filed in time and a missed limit of the kind the NSA spent hours on.
From notification to a time limit: the secretariat’s flow
The process that breaks does not start with “an IT system”. It starts on a morning when someone has to check more than one mailbox. In a small practice that person is the same legal adviser who will be in court after lunch. In a larger one it is the secretariat, a trainee, sometimes the bookkeeper who “goes into the e-Tax Office anyway for invoices”. Any of those people may open a document. Any opening in the e-Tax Office, on the NSA’s line, may be the day of service. A register that does not record who collected the item leaves a gap in the firm’s own evidence: when the client asks from which day you counted fourteen days, there is no log to show.
A firm running a dozen tax disputes and several dozen court matters may, in a single week, receive a decision in the e-Tax Office, a request on the professional ADE, a copy from the Courts Information Portal and a letter asking for a power of attorney to be completed. Without a shared list those four items sit in four tools. The tax decision’s deadline lands in the representative’s private calendar. The court request — in the secretariat notebook. Someone checked the ADE on Friday, the e-Tax Office on Monday, because another person holds the password. The client is told that “nothing has arrived yet”, while a document has been sitting in an account for three days and, after the NSA judgment, it is still unclear whether the authority will treat it as served.
A flow that can be kept without software looks modest, but it has to be complete. Nobody outside the revenue administration replaces the official e-Tax Office, so nobody pulls documents from it instead of logging in. After a channel has been checked, by hand or with limited help from software, a single entry should sit on the matter file.
- A fixed rhythm of checks: professional ADE, firm ADE, e-Tax Office, Courts Information Portal, paper post and — while anything still arrives there — ePUAP.
- A record of channel, sender, case or decision number, date of arrival (availability) and date of actual collection, with the name of the person who opened the file.
- A link to the power of attorney in that matter: which address for service was named, whether there is separate e-Tax Office consent, whether the authority was entitled to choose that channel.
- Calculation of the time limit under the channel’s rule: e-Delivery (14 days from arrival, deemed service under Articles 41–42 of the Electronic Delivery Act), e-Tax Office (day of collection or no service), paper (Article 150 of the Ordinance or the CAP), court (the procedural rules for that case).
- Assignment to the matter file, an alert to the lawyer in charge and — if the e-Tax Office item has not been collected — a note that the authority may still send it to the address on the power of attorney.
The last point is new compared with the routine before the judgment. A firm that sees an unopened item in the e-Tax Office faces a choice: open it and start time running, or leave it and expect the authority to use ePUAP or the ADE on the power of attorney. That is a procedural decision, not an IT one. The register should record it, not take it for the representative. If someone opens the item “just to see whether it matters”, the date is already in the KAS system. Access to the e-Tax Office should therefore not hang on a shared office password. Professional secrecy and GDPR already dislike that; after 3 August there is also a time-limit argument.
The address on the power of attorney, e-Tax Office consent and a second mailbox from 1 October
Article 145 § 2 of the Ordinance: documents are served on the representative at the address named in the power of attorney. The NSA treated that provision as a guarantee and as special. The special power of attorney form is a statement for the file in a particular proceeding. If the representative entered ePUAP or an ADE there, the authority — in the court’s view — may not treat a later, general consent to the e-Tax Office as an automatic change of that address. Consent adds a channel. It does not withdraw the statement on the file. In practice the firm must know what stands in each power of attorney, not merely “we have e-Tax Office consent, so everything goes there”. An Excel tick “e-TO: yes” against a lawyer’s name is not enough when Kowalski’s matter names a different address from Nowak’s.
1 October 2026 is the deadline for non-public entities registered in CEIDG by 31 December 2024. From that day they must have an e-Delivery address — Article 152(3) of the Act, MC timetable. Anyone who updated an entry after 30 June 2025 was already under the duty. For a law firm this is not only its own mailbox. It is clients’ mailboxes. A request the authority sends to a sole-trader client’s ADE may never reach the representative if the authority was not told the address on the power of attorney, or if that instrument does not cover the channel. A client who “does not look at e-Delivery because they have a law firm” faces deemed service under Article 41 of the Electronic Delivery Act after fourteen days. A representative who does not know about that letter starts counting from a phone call in the fourth week.
Hence a second register beside correspondence: a register of powers of attorney with the address for service, the date given, the scope of the matter and whether the client has an ADE. From October 2026 the question “does this sole-trader client have a mailbox” stops being a curiosity. It is part of whether the power of attorney is complete. A tax practice that also keeps books meets accountancy-office software here: the bookkeeping file and the dispute file should not share one mailbox merely because the NIP is the same. Invoices go through KSeF — the duty to issue them has applied to most taxpayers since 1 April 2026, as we described for KSeF in a firm application. Process documents are not invoices. Mixing those streams in one e-mail inbox is the shortest path to a decision sitting between an official acknowledgement and a payment reminder.
A spreadsheet, an off-the-shelf CRM or a separate register
A one-person practice with a handful of tax matters a year can keep this in a spreadsheet. Columns: matter, channel, date in, date collected, who opened it, time-limit rule, end date, address on the power of attorney, link to the file. The condition is that the sheet does not live on a stick in a drawer and is not copied by e-mail. One copy, a backup, access only for people on the matters. Once there are dozens of matters and more than one person opens the mail, the sheet stops telling you whether a row is current. Two people check the e-Tax Office the same morning, both add a line, one opens a document “while they are there”. The date of service is in the portal; the sheet has two conflicting notes.
An off-the-shelf law-firm CRM will handle the matter, the reference, time recording and the hearing calendar. Many of those products can keep documents on the file and remind you of a date. Fewer of them distinguish the rule for a time limit by channel of service, or record that an e-Tax Office item has not been collected so time has not started. If your CRM lets you add a “channel” and “collected on” field, and does not hand the file to a trainee “because that is how permissions fell out”, extending the tool you already have is cheaper than a new system. The question to ask the vendor is whether a proof of receipt from e-Delivery (a separate official document) can be attached, and whether an opening log can be exported when a client or a court asks for the date. If not, you are left with a manual note or an integration.
Integration with e-Delivery is sometimes offered by qualified providers; the public mailbox on Biznes.gov.pl has its own interface. The e-Tax Office and the Courts Information Portal are official tools. One does not “plug into KAS” instead of logging in. A dedicated register makes sense when the firm has several roles (profession, company, accountancy practice), several representatives, different addresses on powers of attorney and needs a trail of who opened what. It does not make sense when the problem is that nobody checks the mailboxes — no application repairs that. First the rhythm: who, which channels, at what time of day. Then a tool that records that rhythm. The distinction between an off-the-shelf programme and software built to order is simply economic here: one does not build a matter engine from scratch if a CRM already stands and what is missing is one delivery register.
A correspondence register that can sit on the matter file
GESOFT builds panels and CRMs around a given flow, not around a catalogue of features. In a firm that, after I FSK 1307/25, cannot say from which day it is counting a time limit, the logical piece is not “a new client portal” but a layer on the files you already have: arrival, channel, collection, power of attorney, alert. Official mailboxes are not replaced. What is replaced is the scrap of paper that says “something came from the tax office” with no collection date.
If such a register is to sit beside a working CRM or as a module of it, a few things follow directly from the process already described. Not a wish list. The list without which you are back to two calendars.
- Inbound item: channel (professional ADE, firm ADE, e-Tax Office, ePUAP, Courts Information Portal, paper/hybrid), sender, reference, date made available, date collected, person who opened it.
- A time-limit rule taken from the channel, with an explicit note of whether deemed service under the Electronic Delivery Act, the day of actual collection from the e-Tax Office, or the Ordinance / CAP list was applied.
- The power of attorney on the matter: address for service, scope, date, a note of e-Tax Office consent — without overwriting the address on the file with a single “consent: yes” on the lawyer’s account.
- Access to the document limited to the matter team; a shared e-Tax Office password is not acceptable if the time of opening has procedural effect.
- An export of proof: who, when, from which channel — for the client, an appeal or a dispute about a missed time limit.
A client portal, if the firm wants one, shows matter status and a request for documents, not the client’s e-Delivery mailbox. The client still has to have their own ADE when the statute requires it. The firm may remind them to check the mailbox; it cannot run the mailbox in the client’s place if the Act ties legal effect to the BAE entry. GDPR and professional secrecy decide who in the team sees the text of a decision and who sees only that “a document arrived, 14 days from 12 September”. That is the same split of roles that data protection in a web application already requires, only with a sharper result: a timestamp in the log may be the date of service.
Describe your project