Limitation of PIT Liabilities
In practice, a personal income tax payer must wait over 6 years for their tax liability to become time-barred. For example, the obligation to pay PIT for 2023 will not lapse until the end of 2029. This is because PIT is settled as an annual liability (not monthly, as in the case of VAT).
Additionally, the annual PIT return must be filed by the end of April of the following year – i.e. for 2023, no later than 30 April 2024 – and the tax must be paid or supplemented by that date.
Under the applicable provisions (Art. 70 § 1 of the Tax Ordinance Act), a tax liability lapses after 5 years from the end of the calendar year in which the tax payment deadline fell. The limitation period outlined above applies to tax liabilities arising by operation of law – for instance, PIT settlements in respect of income from salaried work performed abroad.
In light of the above, seafarers wishing to claim abolition relief in PIT-36 for 2023 (filed in 2024) must bear in mind that the tax authority may verify the return until 31 December 2029. This deadline also applies to taxpayers who have not filed any tax return despite being obliged to do so.
Furthermore, this already lengthy period of over 6 years may easily be extended by suspension or interruption of the limitation period. For example, this may result from the initiation of proceedings for a fiscal offence or fiscal misdemeanour, or from the service of a decision on the acceptance of security for the liability arising from a tax authority decision.
Moreover, the limitation period may also be interrupted by the application of any enforcement measure by the tax authority.
Example: Limitation and the 2026 NSA Judgment Concerning the 2017 Tax Year
In the case decided by the NSA judgment of 29 January 2026 (II FSK 702/23), the dispute concerned income tax for 2017. The payment deadline for PIT for 2017 fell on 30 April 2018, and accordingly the 5-year limitation period would have expired on 31 December 2023. However, tax proceedings were initiated earlier – the first-instance decision was issued in 2022. A seafarer in an analogous situation who delayed correcting their return until 2024 or later could face a situation in which the limitation period is suspended (e.g., as a result of the initiation of fiscal criminal proceedings) – extending the period of liability by several further years.
Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.
The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.
Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.
He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.
Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.
He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.
