How to check an outsourced accountant's licence in Latvia

Your Latvian company is registered, or nearly, the bank account works, and someone has quoted you a monthly fee to keep the books. Before you sign, there is a check that takes about five minutes and is not obvious from outside the country. In Latvia, a provider who keeps accounts for other companies under contract must hold a licence issued by the State Revenue Service, the tax authority known here by its Latvian initials VID. Since 1 July 2023 there is no general grace period left. Obtaining the licence is the provider's job. Making sure the accounts of your Latvian company are kept by someone entitled to keep them belongs to whoever heads that company, and if you are its sole board member, that is you.

What Latvia licenses, and why it lands on the buyer

The rule sits in the Accounting Law (Grāmatvedības likums), adopted on 10 June 2021 and in force since 1 January 2022. Section 38, paragraph one is one sentence long: the activity of an outsourced accountant is permitted if that person holds a valid outsourced accountant licence. The Latvian term is ārpakalpojuma grāmatvedis, and the English wording the tax authority uses on its own English pages is outsourced accountant. Carry that phrase with you into the register, because nothing else in it will look familiar.

Paragraph 3 of the transitional provisions let existing providers carry on without a licence until 1 July 2023 and no longer. One narrower exception survives in the same paragraph and gets mistaken for the rule itself: a person at or close to state pension age can be licensed without the education requirements, and that licence cannot run past 1 July 2027. Which is why the end date in the register matters, and not only the status word.

This is national Latvian regulation; there is no single EU-wide accountant licence. So the question is not whether your provider is a qualified accountant somewhere. It is whether this specific Latvian permission exists for the specific service you are buying.

Section 31 is what turns this into your problem rather than the provider's alone. It puts a statutory duty to organise how the accounts are kept on the head of the undertaking, and for a Latvian SIA that means its management board rather than its shareholders. If you own the company but sit on no board, the duty sits with the people who do, which is worth establishing before you assume it is handled. In the shape most foreign founders use, sole shareholder and sole board member in one person, both hats are yours. Section 34, paragraph one then says the accounts are kept by an accountant or an outsourced accountant with whom the head has concluded a written agreement. Appointing someone is part of organising the accounts. It is not a way of handing the duty over.

An English text of the Accounting Law sits on likumi.lv and it is worth opening. It is also flagged on its own page as out of date, and in at least one place it contradicts the Latvian. Section 28 is the example: the English pins the seventy-five year storage period to payroll documents dated from 1 January 1999, while the Latvian pins it to documents dated before that day, and the next clause covers everything after. Use the English to find your way around the structure. The Latvian text is the one with legal force, and before you act on any single provision it is worth having the Latvian reading of it confirmed.

Who has to hold it, and who does not

The law attaches the status to what is actually done under the contract, not to the word printed on the invoice. The table covers the situations a foreign owner actually meets.

The third row is where the boundary gets tested, and the statutory list is written for accountants rather than for buyers. The practical test is what the provider has to produce. If the contract makes them keep the accounting registers or prepare the annual statement and other financial statements, the general rule applies and the licence is needed. If it stops at entering invoices, scanning documents and calculating payroll inputs, it does not. Read every proposal against that line rather than against its price. Section 36 adds two further exclusions, for public bodies serving one another, which will not touch a private company.

If your provider sits outside Latvia, or the work is split across two countries, the same test applies to the service supplied to your Latvian company, and a qualification held at home does not stand in for the Latvian licence. That one is worth putting to a specialist with the contract in front of them.

Ask whether a licence is needed in your case

The check itself, in about five minutes

Section 39 calls it the Register of Outsourced Accountants, the State Revenue Service keeps it inside its public database, and anyone may search it free of charge. On screen the heading is Latvian, Licencēto ārpakalpojuma grāmatvežu reģistrs. There is no English version of the register itself, and the language switch on the Latvian page about it drops you on the English homepage rather than translating anything. The page holding the form declares its language only in a legacy attribute, so most browsers will not offer to translate it for you either. Leave it in Latvian. Machine translation replaces the very labels you need to steer by, and every one of them is named below.

1. Go straight to the form at www6.vid.gov.lv/LAGR and check the heading reads Licencēto ārpakalpojuma grāmatvežu reģistrs. The State Revenue Service links to the same address from its English page about the outsourced accountant licence. Reach it through the authority's Latvian pages instead and the form arrives in an embedded frame that loads only after you accept the site's third-party cookies, so a grey notice where the search should be is a consent prompt rather than a broken page.
2. Take the details from the supplier block of the draft contract, not from a brand name, a website or the person who emailed you the quote. You are checking the legal party that will sign. If no draft exists yet, ask the provider in writing for the exact legal name, the Latvian registration code and the licence number, and run the check on that reply.
3. The first field is a pair of radio buttons under the word Persona (person): fiziskā for a natural person and juridiskā for a legal person. The page opens on fiziskā. If your provider is a company, switch to juridiskā before you type anything, and if you have already typed, clear the boxes and start again. The red asterisks mark all three boxes at once, and that is only half true: for a company the search runs on the code alone, while for a natural person the form refuses to submit until the name boxes are filled as well.
4. For a company, fill in Reģistrācijas kods (registration code) only. It sits at the bottom, under the two name boxes, and it takes the eleven-digit registration number printed on Latvian contracts and invoices as Reģ. Nr. Enter eleven digits and nothing else, stripping any spaces or hyphens. If your supplier has no eleven-digit Latvian number, this box cannot help you, and the paragraph that closes this section is the one you need. If the number in front of you begins with the letters LV, that is the VAT number and it will not fit, so drop the two letters. Working from an invoice, make sure the number you copy belongs to the supplier and not to you.
5. For a self-employed provider the form also wants Vārds (vārdi) (given name or names) and Uzvārds (surname), and it will not submit until both are filled. Copy them from the contract rather than typing them, because Latvian names carry letters your keyboard probably does not have, and a plain a in place of an ā is a different name. The code still does all the work: the database refuses to search without it and there is no lookup by name anywhere in the register. Without that number you cannot check the person at all, so ask for it before you sign rather than after.
6. Press Atlasīt (select). There is nothing to log in to and nothing to pay.
7. A record comes back as a card, and the card by itself settles nothing, because a cancelled licence returns one too. At the top, Nosaukums (name) and Reģistrācijas kods. Below that, a table with Vārds, uzvārds (the responsible outsourced accountant), Licences Nr. (licence number), Licences statuss (status), Licences izsniegšanas datums (date of issue), Licence derīga no (valid from), Plānotais licences beigu datums (planned end date) and Licences anulēšana (cancellation, carrying a date and a ground when there is one).
8. Two more tables can follow. One appears only where there is suspension history and lists each period with the date it began, the date it ended and the ground. The last one, Licencēm atbilstošās Civiltiesiskās atbildības apdrošināšanas polises, holds the civil liability insurance policies with Polise spēkā no and Polise spēkā līdz, valid from and valid until. Every date on the card is written day.month.year, so 22.02.2023 is 22 February 2023. Sort the policy rows by Polise spēkā no before you read them, because the register returns them in no particular order and a list that looks as though it has a hole in it usually has the missing year sitting further down. A policy covers you today if today falls between that row’s two dates.
9. At the foot of the card sits Informācija atjaunota with a date and time, and an Izdrukai link that prints what is on screen. Section 39 requires the register to be refreshed at least once every five working days, so what you are reading can be up to five working days behind. Print the card and keep it with the contract.

It is a pass only when four things line up: the name and registration code match the supplier block of your contract, Licences statuss reads Spēkā, the planned end date has not passed, and the insurance table shows a policy covering the day you sign. Read all of it as true only up to the Informācija atjaunota timestamp. If the status reads Apturēta or Anulēta, the provider is not currently allowed to supply outsourced accounting, so do not sign for that service. If nothing resolves at all, hold the decision rather than guessing: check the registration code again, check the separate list described below where it applies, and look at what the contract actually covers. And run the whole check once more on the day you sign, because a status can move between a quote and a signature.

Three different empty answers come back from that form and they mean three different things. The one you are most likely to meet first is Ievadiet reģistrācijas kodu!, enter the registration code, which appears whenever the code box is empty. Three more warnings can fire before the form is even sent, all in Latvian: Ievadiet vārdu (vārdus)! asks for the given name, Ievadiet uzvārdu! asks for the surname, which is usually the form telling you the switch is still on fiziskā, and Reģistrācijas kodam ir jāsastāv no 11 cipariem says the code must be eleven digits.

Past those, two answers matter. The one beginning Nav informācijas par norādīto NMR kodu says the register found nothing for the code you entered and suggests it may be wrong. NMR kods is the taxpayer registration code, so check the number first: a dropped digit, an LV prefix left in place, or a number lifted from the wrong line of an invoice all produce it. If a code you have checked against the contract still returns that message, stop treating it as your own mistake. It appears just as readily when the code belongs to no Latvian taxpayer at all, and when the provider is established in another member state, which is the case the closing paragraph of this section covers.

The answer beginning Ārpakalpojuma grāmatvedim and running on nav izsniegta licence ārpakalpojuma grāmatveža darbībai is the different one: the taxpayer exists and no outsourced accountant licence has been issued. That is the answer that concerns your provider. To anyone who does not read Latvian the two look equally like a dead end, so read the first word. If you get either of them, ask the provider to send you their exact Latvian registration code in writing, and the licence number, which begins with the letters AGL, if they say they hold one. A verbal explanation of a Latvian error message is not a check. If the status comes back as anything other than Spēkā, the section further down on what happens mid-year is the one to read next.

Finally, the case the search box cannot handle. Providers established in another European Union member state do hold Latvian licences, and they are nowhere in that form. They are published as a downloadable file on the tax authority’s Latvian page about the register, under the heading Citu ES dalībvalstu licencēto ārpakalpojuma grāmatvežu reģistrs. Search it for the legal name or the foreign registration code from your contract, and read the status column the same way you would read the register. On 8 September 2026 the file held three entries, from Sweden, Spain and Estonia, all in force. Their registration codes are foreign in format, and entering one in the search box returns the same Nav informācijas par norādīto NMR kodu message a typing error produces. So if your bookkeeping sits with a firm registered elsewhere in the Union, open that file before you conclude anything at all.

Three status words, read literally

Spēkā means in force. It says the licence was valid when the register was last refreshed. It says nothing about the standard of the work.

Apturēta means suspended, and a suspended licence is not authority to carry on. Three of the seven grounds in Section 38, paragraph five are ones a client can see or ask about: no valid civil liability insurance policy, the responsible outsourced accountant leaving without another being registered with the State Revenue Service, and failure to file changes to the register data. If a suspended licence is not restored within a year, it is cancelled.

Anulēta means cancelled, and the ten grounds in Section 38, paragraph six sit in heavier territory than the suspension list: among them the responsible accountant appearing on the list of risk persons, a legal address that matches a risk address, tax evasion, and removal from the Commercial Register. The law says cancellation removes the provider from the register. In the live search on 8 September 2026 a cancelled entry still came back, showing the status word together with the cancellation date and the ground. If such an entry does come back, read the date and the ground as the record of what happened, and treat the status word itself as the answer.

What the register will not tell you

A licence confirms that a provider met the conditions the law sets. It is not a quality mark. Those conditions are education at first-level professional higher or bachelor's degree level in accounting, economics, management or finance; at least three years of experience in accounting; documented internal control policies and procedures under the anti-money laundering legislation; and civil liability insurance.

Section 40 fixes that insurance in law rather than by the size of your company. The minimum liability limit is EUR 3000, and EUR 5000 where at least one client's net turnover from economic activity in the previous reporting year exceeded EUR 300 000. It is a step rather than a scale, and it is recalculated on the previous reporting year, so a provider who takes on one large client has to carry more from then on. That figure is a floor written into the law, not an undertaking that any particular loss will be paid.

The register holds less than it appears to. One licence covers the company rather than each accountant it employs, which is the State Revenue Service's own description on its English page. The entry names one responsible outsourced accountant. It does not tell you which person will actually handle your ledgers, what language they work in, whether they have read a crypto or fintech balance sheet before, what the monthly fee includes, when the annual statement gets prepared, or how liability is divided if something is filed late. All of that belongs in the contract, and Section 34, paragraph one requires a written agreement setting out that person's obligations, rights and liability. A verbal arrangement does not satisfy the law.

The part of the risk you cannot outsource

Section 31 puts the duty to organise the keeping of accounts, the inventory, the storage of the documents and the preparation of the reports on the head of the undertaking. Section 33 goes further: the head is responsible for accounts being kept in accordance with the law and for the originals, copies or data images of accounting documents being preserved, protected and available to auditors, the tax administration, law enforcement authorities and the courts. That same section makes the head liable for losses caused through their own fault to the company, to the state or to a third party, and gives those who suffered the loss the right to claim compensation under the procedure laid down in law.

No standalone offence of using an unlicensed provider exists in the Accounting Law. Penalties attach to the failures underneath, and they apply whoever you hired. Failing to comply with the provisions for keeping accounts, or missing the deadline for the annual statement and consolidated annual statement, carries a warning or a fine of up to four hundred fine units, and source document failures up to eighty-six units, or up to four hundred where excise goods are involved. One fine unit is EUR 5 under Section 16 of the Administrative Liability Law, so four hundred units is EUR 2000.

Who pays is a question the Accounting Law leaves to the general rules. It states the amounts without naming a subject; the Administrative Liability Law sets the outer limits for both, up to four hundred fine units for a natural person and up to four thousand for a legal person. Whether proceedings run against the company or against an official is settled in the case itself, and the State Revenue Service conducts them. If a notice arrives, that is the first thing to establish rather than to assume.

If you outsource, choosing a licensed provider is how you comply with the rule on who may keep the accounts. Keeping them yourself where the law allows it, or employing an accountant, are the other two routes. None of the three is a mechanism for moving your own obligations somewhere else.

If the licence stops in the middle of a financial year

Nothing about your obligations pauses while the provider puts its licence back in order. The accounts still have to be kept by an accountant or an outsourced accountant under a written agreement, unless the law allows the head to keep them personally. If you have to change provider during a financial year, three things decide how hard it is.

The documents. Preservation and availability sit with the head of the company, and under Section 27, paragraph four a third party may use accounting documents, or remove them from the company, only with the head's permission unless a law gives another basis. So a handover is something to write into the agreement in advance: which files, in what format, by what date.

Where they are allowed to live. Paper accounting documents are stored in the territory of Latvia. Electronic ones may be stored in Latvia or in another European Union member state, under the EU regulation on the free flow of non-personal data. Worth asking about before you sign, because a provider's answer of "it is all in the cloud" does not by itself tell you which country the cloud sits in.

How long. Annual statements are kept until the company is reorganised or its activity ends, unless another law says otherwise. Inventory lists, accounting registers and accounting organisation documents run ten years, and so do payroll source documents, with holiday pay records running ten years from the day the employment ended. Everything else is kept until it is no longer needed to trace an economic transaction, and never less than five years. The periods sit in Section 28.

At a minimum, four things belong in the contract: a duty on the provider to tell you if the licence is suspended or cancelled; a stated order and deadline for handing over documents and access when the contract ends; the name of the person who actually does the work; and who is authorised to file for the company in the Electronic Declaration System (EDS), the state portal through which returns and statements are submitted. The law demands the written agreement. The detail inside it is yours to set, within what the accounting, tax and anti-money laundering rules already require.

If you will sign from outside the European Union, confirm how before anything is drafted. Nobody has to appear in person: under the Electronic Documents Law an electronic document meets the written-form requirement when it carries an electronic signature and meets the other requirements laid down in laws and regulations. It is deemed signed by hand when that signature is a qualified one within the meaning of Regulation (EU) 910/2014, or when it carries an electronic signature and the parties have agreed in writing to sign that way. Section 26 of the same law gives a certificate issued abroad qualified status in two cases: the provider is registered with the supervisory authority of an EU member state, or it is a third-country provider under Article 14 of the regulation. Ask whoever supplies your signing tool who issued its certificate and which of those cases applies, and if it is neither, ask your accountant how the two of you will record the signing method in writing first.

Run the same check on us

SIA "Lex & Finance", registration number 40203239265, Kalpaka bulvāris 10, Riga, is in the State Revenue Service register of licensed outsourced accountants under licence number AGL0001078. Status in the register: in force. Date of issue 22 February 2023, valid from 23 February 2023, planned end date 22 February 2028, with four insurance policies covering the period since November 2022 with no gap between them once they are put in date order. Read from the register on 8 September 2026. Switch the form to juridiskā, enter 40203239265, press Atlasīt, and compare what comes back with the dated record above.

A licence number is a fact you can check in the public register, and that is exactly as far as it goes. It confirms compliance with the licensing rules, not the quality of anyone's work, ours included. What any provider will actually do each month, and what stays with you, belongs in the written contract; ours is described on our accounting page.

Ask our specialist to read your contract

Three questions worth settling before you sign

Nothing came up for my provider. Are they working illegally?

Not by itself. Only one of the messages, the one beginning Ārpakalpojuma grāmatvedim, says anything about the provider at all; the others are about the code you typed or the empty box. Even that one leaves two innocent explanations: a provider registered in another European Union member state sits on a separate downloadable file rather than in the search box, and a provider doing only recording and data work is not an outsourced accountant within the meaning of Section 34 and needs no licence for it. Ask for the registration code and the licence number in writing before you decide.

Does any of this change because I live outside Latvia?

No. The law writes the duties in Sections 31 and 33 for the head of the undertaking and does not attach a residence condition to them. A board member sitting in New York, Delhi or Dubai carries the same duty to organise the keeping of the accounts and the preservation of the documents as a board member in Riga, and the same liability for losses caused through their own fault. Distance changes how you supervise the work, not who answers for it.

The licence runs to 2028. Is there anything to watch before then?

Re-registration at the five-year mark is the provider's task, and the state fee of EUR 100 is theirs to pay. The insurance table is the thing to look at once a year, because the State Revenue Service requires a renewed civil liability policy to be filed every year through the Electronic Declaration System, and a policy that is not in force is one of the grounds for suspending a licence. The insurance dates and the status line are not necessarily refreshed at the same moment, so an apparent gap is something to ask about rather than to conclude from.

Prepared and checked on 8 September 2026 against the Accounting Law (Sections 27, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 and 41 to 45, and paragraph 3 of the transitional provisions), Section 16 of the Administrative Liability Law, Sections 1, 3 and 26 of the Electronic Documents Law, and the information published by the State Revenue Service on the licensing of outsourced accountants and the register of licensed outsourced accountants. What the register does on screen, including its messages and the order of its tables, was read from the live database on the same date. Norms, amounts and deadlines are stated as at that date. This English text is for information: the Latvian wording of the law is the one with legal force, and it prevails in the event of any difference. This is a general description of the procedure and not legal advice on an individual matter.