This document will guide you through the tax report flow — please follow this when creating your tax report on Lightyear. And if you have any more questions, check out our FAQ here.
You’ll find the report flow:
- On web: tap on your profile image in the top right corner -> settings -> tax reporting
- On mobile: tap on your profile image in the top left corner -> tap on the three dots next to ‘Investeerimiskonto’ -> tax reporting
We strongly recommend going through this flow in our web platform, as the big screen makes it a lot easier to look over all the information and data included in the report. Please also make sure you go through this flow when you have time to focus on validating the information shown.
Remember that you have to declare your investment account even if you haven’t made any investments in 2024. In this case, if you haven’t deposited or withdrawn money, nor purchased or sold assets, you’ll have to tick the relevant box in Table 6.5 part I.
If you’re also declaring other investment accounts this year, please first import statements from other banks into your declaration and only as the last step, add your data from Lightyear into Table 6.5. Because of technical reasons, if you did this the other way around, the previously entered Lightyear data could disappear from your final declaration in the EMTA portal.
Let’s jump into the flow:
Mark the investment accounts you’ve made payments from or to in 2024
First, we ask you which of the accounts that you’ve used to deposit money from, or withdrawn money to, you use as investment accounts. If Lightyear is your only investment account, you won’t need to do anything here. But if you have multiple investment accounts, then marking them on this step helps us make reporting easier for you.
To avoid overpaying on tax, money movements (deposits and withdrawals) between different investment accounts are not declared. In your final declaration, EMTA determines your tax liability by combining all contributions (deposits) and withdrawals from and to all your investment accounts. That’s why it’s important not to declare contributions or withdrawals twice.
Simply put, you shouldn’t declare deposits into your Lightyear investment account from another investment account, nor withdrawals from your Lightyear investment account to another investment account.
By letting us know which other accounts you’ll report as investment accounts for 2024, we can filter out the transactions that should not be reported.
Review your transactions
In this step, you can review all reportable data points, so please pay close attention. We’ve added explanations for each transaction so you could easily understand what you’ll be reporting and why.
Remember that in the investment account regime, you don’t report buy or sell transactions of financial instruments. Instead you report:
- contributions: money paid into the investment account. This includes deposits from your regular account, dividend and interest payments, or rewards (e.g. those received by referring a friend) that have already been taxed before being received into your Lightyear investment account.
- withdrawals: money withdrawn from the investment account and taken into consumption outside of investment activity. This only includes withdrawals to your regular account.
Meaning, already taxed dividends, interest, and other similar payments to your investment account count towards contributions, and increase the total amount you can eventually withdraw without tax liability.
Any gains you’ve made from selling financial instruments or from receiving dividends or interest where tax has not been withheld (for example gains from MMFs or ETFs), are not reported in the investment account regime (table 6.5 part II). Instead, they’re considered gains that will be taxed once you withdraw more money from your investment account than you have paid in.
Initial deposit
If you joined Lightyear during 2024, then your initial deposit is the very first deposit of money (from a regular, not another investment account) that you made into Lightyear. If you’ve been with us from before 2024, then your initial deposit date is 01.01.2024 – the date of the investment account law changetaking effect.
If you’ve been using Lightyear from before 2024 and held financial instruments on your account as of 1.01.2024, then your Lightyear investment account initial deposit needs to include two parts:
- Acquisition cost of all the investments you held as of 01.01.2024, converted to euros. If you’ve bought any of these instruments multiple times, we’ll use the profit and loss calculation method you chose last year, to calculate the average acquisition cost. This also includes cash in your Savings, as Money Market Funds.
- Cash on your account as of 01.01.2024, converted to euros. If you’ve made deposits to Lightyear from another investment account before 2024, you’ll need to subtract these amounts from your opening cash balance, before entering that info to your final tax declaration in EMTA’s portal.
The calculation for your initial deposit is only shown once, when you first go through this flow — please pay extra attention here, and if needed, take a screenshot of the data. After finishing the flow, you’ll only be able to access this calculation with the help of our customer support team.
Review transactions
Here we show you the contributions and withdrawals we believe should be declared to EMTA. This step allows you to untick transactions you don’t think are necessary to report.
For all transactions listed, we’ve included the reason we think these should be declared under the info button next to the payment. Make sure to go through all these transactions and reasons for their inclusion to help us create a correct report for you.
Confirmed transactions
In the third section, under “Confirmed transactions”, we’ve included the contributions we confidently know have already been taxed and need to be declared to avoid double taxation — for this reason, these transactions can’t be unticked.
We’ll include all these in the report we create for you, so you could easily add them to Table 6.5 part II in your final declaration. These transactions count towards contributions and increase the amount of money you can withdraw without occurring tax liability.
Automatically submit the first part of your report
We can automatically forward some information - like taxed dividends and interest - to EMTA for you. If you received this type of income in 2024, we can automatically forward relevant information into Tables 8.1 and/or 8.8 in EMTA. These are the same transactions you already saw under “Confirmed transactions” on the previous screen
We can automatically forward information on:
- taxed interest from non-Estonian issuers into Table 8.1
- taxed dividends from non-Estonian issuers (US, EU, LV and LT stocks’ dividends) into Table 8.8.
Note that some data, such as taxed dividends and taxed interest, will need to be entered in multiple fields on the personal tax declaration form in the EMTA portal, as some fields require the same information.
Since you’re using Lightyear as an investment account, you’ll have to report transactions sent into Tables 8.1 and 8.8, in Table 6.5 part II as well, to avoid double taxation. Remember, this income counts towards contributions, increasing the amount of money you can withdraw without incurring tax liability. All these contributions will appear in your final report in the next step, so you can easily copy data to the EMTA portal.
Make sure to pay extra attention to dividends from US-listed ADR companies
While dividends from these companies have already been taxed, we don’t receive the tax withholding rate information, meaning we can’t forward data on these dividends automatically. If you hold US ADRs that have paid dividends in 2024, you’ll need to confirm the correct tax withholding rate with the issuer and declare these dividends manually.
If you’ve invested in any Estonian instruments
You’ll notice that in your declaration form in EMTA, Tables 5.1 and 7.1 already include pre-filled data about dividends and interest. That’s because local issuers also forward information to EMTA about taxed interest and dividends. If you earned interest on uninvested cash with Lightyear, these payments have been taxed by us throughout 2024, and sit pre-filled in table 5.1.
These payments were also included in the “Confirmed transactions” list in the previous step, and as they’ve already been taxed, the proceeds also count towards contributions to your investment account. This means you’ll need to add them to Table 6.5 part II in your final declaration.
Manually fill in the second part of your report in EMTA’s portal
In this step you’ll see the final report with the data that needs manual submission into EMTA’s portal.
The tables you see in this step will depend on your investment activity with Lightyear, as that determines which fields you need to fill in your tax declaration. The tables outlined below are all the ones that might need attention from Lightyear users.
Table 6.1 shows sales transactions of Estonian instruments, which are automatically reported to EMTA by Nasdaq. If you’ve sold Nasdaq Baltic securities through an individual CSD account, and use Lightyear as an investment account, you should remove those transactions in EMTA’s portal.
Under Table 6.5 of the final report, we show you all the rows of information you’ll need to submit in EMTA to your tax declaration.
- Into 6.5 part one, you’ll need to add your Lightyear account number, name of the account provider (Lightyear Europe AS) and Lightyear BIC (LY). We’ll show you all these in the report to easily copy-paste.
- Into 6.5 part two, you’ll need to enter all the rows shown in your Lightyear tax report, on this step. You can either copy each row and field by tapping on it, or download a CSV file of the report to edit data (if needed) and then copy to EMTA.
Table 8.2 shows sales transactions for Latvian and Lithuanian instruments. These are automatically reported to EMTA by Nasdaq. So, just like with Estonian securities, if you’ve bought these through an individual CSD account, and use Lightyear as an investment account, you should remove the transactions in EMTA’s portal.
Reminder for Tables 6.1 and 8.2
For Tables 6.1 and 8.2, you might have to delete rows of sell transactions with Baltic instruments. This is because NasdaqCSD, the central securities depository for Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian instruments, also sends information directly to EMTA. You’ll only need to remove the information if you hold an individual (owner) account in NasdaqCSD. Since they have no way of knowing whether you used an investment account to make the transactions, you should delete those from EMTA’s declaration, because in the investment account regime, transactions with financial instruments are not reported at all.
If you’ve made instruments transfers into Lightyear, please refer to our FAQ for information on what and how needs to be declared.
All tables relevant for Lightyear investment account users:
Depending on your investment activity with Lightyear, these are all the tables in your personal income tax declaration in EMTA which might show relevant information for you or need to be filled to keep your report correct.
| Table | Content | Filling in |
| 5.1 | Taxed interest earned in Estonia — pre-filled in EMTA with our uninvested cash interest, and taxed bond interest payments | Pre-filled |
| 6.1 | Estonian instrument sales. As these are automatically pre-filled in EMTA by NasdaqCSD and are not reportable if made with an investment account, you might have to delete these rows from Table 6.1. For users who need to do so, we outline it in their tax report. | Pre-filled |
| 6.5 | Main table for all investment account information. This one you will need to fill in manually. Part I — Lightyear information, shown to you in the generated tax report Part II — all payments in and out of your Lightyear investment account which we show you in the Lightyear tax report. Table 6.5 also requires duplicating information from pre-filled tables:
| Filled in manually. All of these fields are shown to you in your Lightyear tax report to easily copy-paste. |
| 7.1 | Taxed dividends earned in Estonia — pre-filled in EMTA by issuers who make the distributions. | Pre-filled |
| 8.1 | Taxed interest earned outside Estonia. For Lightyear users, this means Latvian and Lithuanian bonds’ interest payments. | Submitted automatically from Lightyear |
| 8.2 | Foreign instrument sales. As Latvian and Lithuanian instrument sales are automatically pre-filled in EMTA by NasdaqCSD and are not reportable if made with an investment account, you might have to delete these rows from Table 8.2. For users who need to do so, we outline it in their tax report. | Pre-filled |
| 8.8 | Taxed dividends earned outside Estonia, for example US and European stocks’ dividends. You can submit information to this table automatically during your tax report flow. | Submitted automatically from Lightyear |
And that’s it! Hopefully this report makes declaring your investment taxes as easy as possible. As for next year, we’re already working with EMTA to make sure Lightyear will have access to their automated tax reporting system, for your 2025 taxes, reportable in 2026.
As always, let us know if you have any questions
Team Lightyear
Disclaimer
While we can help guide you through this report, we can’t offer tax advice. For that, please consult with a dedicated tax professional.