Morocco to Impose Fines on Late Payments in Business Crackdown

Morocco wants to wage a war against payment delays and introduce fines instead of late payment penalties against bad payers, says l’Économiste. According to the same daily, this change, decided by the Ministry of Finance, the CGEM and the Chambers of Commerce, will soon be introduced into the law on payment terms.

Regarding the fine for unpaid bills, it will not be applied by the supplier, who will only have to deal with the recovery. It will rather have the character of a public debt, similar, for example, to a fine for a traffic violation, and will be recovered by the Treasury or the DGI, according to modalities that remain to be defined.

As for the procedure, each company will have to indicate its own payment terms in a tax return. Creditors, for their part, will then have to draw up a table with the breakdown of supplier debts by maturity.

The introduction of a late payment fine comes at a time when companies are facing a tsunami of unpaid bills. It should be noted that inter-company receivables reached 420 billion dirhams in 2019, compared to 390 billion dirhams in 2018, while payment delays are involved in 40% of business failures. It is justified by the non-application of late payment penalties.