Archive and audit services
With IBM Sterling e-Invoicing archive and audit services, a signed or validated invoice can be archived for future auditing by your company, local tax authorities, or tax authorities in clearance countries.
Archival of invoices for tax audit purposes is a critical component of compliance. Archive services are required by law in Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey, and are therefore included automatically through a third-party service provider. For other countries, archiving with TrustWeaver archive is available. Alternatively, you can archive in your own database or that of a third party.
At any point in time during the mandatory storage period, a tax auditor should be able to access the parties’ archives on-line, typically from the party’s principal business location in the country and in human-readable format, and verify the authenticity and integrity of the stored e-invoices. The audit web page described in Appendix 2 is used to support these audit requirements.
The archiving service incorporates the graphical user interface Archive GUI that allows for an end user to search for and access its archived documents. The located invoice can either be downloaded to disk or be audited, if applicable, by launching the Audit Service web page. It is also possible to audit the invoices directly in the Audit Service web page by inputting the unique reference to the invoice that was returned in the original storage request; this process is typically used to provide a one-click audit of an invoice if the reference is available in e.g. an e-mail. It is also possible to retrieve invoices from the Archiving Service using this invoice reference. These last two options may be used by IBM if there is a need to implement an archive viewer on top of the Archiving Service web services interface. The Archive GUI can also be used by the top-level administrator of the end user for end user archive user administration.
Invoice Preservation
The invoice preservation function enables compliance with the Italian Ministry of Finance requirements for the long-term archiving of tax-relevant documents as well as with the Hungarian Ministry of Economy and Transport rules for digital archiving. The invoice preservation function includes the following features:
- The preservation procedure is run at regular intervals and processes invoices belonging to End Users that are established in Italy and Italian VAT invoices belonging to an end user.
- All unprocessed invoices are hashed individually and combined into one or more preservation sets.
- Aqualified electronic signature is applied to the preservation sets using a key issued to TrustWeaver by a Certification Authority approved by the Italian supervisory body L'Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale (AgID).
- A time-stamp from an AgID-approved Time Stamping Authority (TSA) is applied to the signed preservation set. The resulting closure evidence file contains validation information in an archival electronic signature: XAdES‑A or CAdES-A. It is stored and associated with the processed invoices so that they are available for audit using Audit Services. For e-invoices under Hungarian Law an equivalent procedure is executed. The timestamp applied to the preservation set must be from an accredited Time-stamping Authority; however, the procedure frequency and use of qualified signatures are not regulated. The current parameters are documented in the TrustWeaver Compliance Map.
Audit service
An HTML Audit Service web page to which archived e-invoices can be uploaded. The audit result is presented in a graphical user interface. The audit web page displays the authenticity information in terms of certificate validation; also the integrity status of the e-invoice’s signature is shown. In addition to this, details of the signing and time-stamping certificates can be listed. Certificate policies, as well as signing and signature validation policies, can be accessed easily and reviewed by clicking on the provided cross-links. Invoices to which the ETSI signature formats CAdES-A and XAdES-A have been applied, both in single and multiple forms, can be re-validated by the audit web page. The Audit Service web page interacts with the Archiving Service by accepting audit requests from the Archiving Service web-page as well as direct requests through use of the invoice reference.
With TrustWeaver Archiving, you can audit invoices on an on-demand basis using the TrustWeaver audit page, located on the TrustWeaver web site at: www.trustweaver.com.