TEJ — the platform for transferring and exchanging tax data — has been mandatory for every Tunisian company since 1 January 2026. Withholding tax certificates, previously filed by varying means, now all go through it.
Key points
- Scope: all companies, with no headcount or turnover threshold.
- Two filing routes: direct entry on the platform, or deposit of an XML file conforming to the CCT-RS-V2 specification and the three published XSD schemas.
- Deadline: certificates must be issued no later than the end of the month following the month of payment. A July payment needs its certificate by 31 August.
- Scope of rejection: a deposit is refused in its entirety if a single certificate is malformed.
Why the XML file becomes the normal route
Direct entry stays workable for a handful of certificates a month. Beyond that it does not: every operation carries an identified beneficiary, a date, a unique reference, amounts, and an operation code drawn from a 36-entry nomenclature.
The XML file is therefore not a convenience for large organisations; it is the normal regime as soon as a company has more than a few suppliers subject to withholding.
Where the difficulty actually is
The format is documented and stable. The difficulty lies elsewhere — in the journey between the accounts and the file.
The costliest point is one line of the schema: amounts are typed as integers rounded to millimes. The dinar carries three decimals, so 1,234.500 TND is written 1234500. A spreadsheet stores 1234.5, and the decimal point gets the deposit refused. It is the first cause of rejection, and it stems from no misunderstanding of the tax rule.
Three further causes recur: a tax ID that does not match 7 digits + 1 capital letter, a duplicated certificate reference within the same deposit — typically a counter restarted at 1 — and a net paid amount that does not exactly equal TTC minus the withholding.
None of these four is reported usefully by the platform, which refuses the whole deposit without naming the offending line.
Checking before you file
We have published a withholding XML validator: it reads the file in the browser, applies the specification's rules, and names the certificate and field at fault. The file is sent nowhere — it lists every beneficiary and every amount, which is not data to transmit for a syntax check.
The complete guide to the XML file covers the obligation and structure; the technical tutorial covers generating it from your own entries.
What to take away
The deadline is monthly and the obligation no longer admits exceptions. Companies still producing their file through an export corrected by hand in a spreadsheet have twelve chances a year to miss a filing — and the check is worth more before submission than after refusal.