TechForge ETD Middleware Service Agreement

version 1.0, 15 September 2026 · TechForge Limited, 6 Cerro Lindo, Bullet Tree Road, Cayo, Belize

This agreement is between TechForge Limited ("TechForge", "we", "us") and the taxpayer registering for the TechForge ETD Portal ("you", "your"). It governs your use of the BTS ETD Middleware and the ETD Portal (together, the "Service"). You accept it by ticking the acceptance box on the registration form; we record the version you accepted, the time, and the network address it came from.

1. What the Service does

The Service is middleware that sits between your accounting, ERP or point-of-sale system and the Belize Tax Service ("BTS") Electronic Fiscal Document Registry. For each document you send us we:

1. assemble it into the UBL XML format the BTS technical specification requires;
2. assign the document's unique identifier (ETDUI) and its number in your sequence;
3. sign it with your taxpayer certificate using a XAdES electronic signature;
4. transmit it to BTS over a mutually authenticated (mTLS) connection; and
5. return the authorization number and QR code for you to print on the document, and record what BTS said.

We support tax invoices, credit notes, debit notes and tax receipts, the cancellation of documents you issued, and the buyer-side events (acceptance, annotation, request for correction, refusal) the specification provides for. You may reach the Service through the API, through a supported plugin, or through the PrintFlow print-capture client.

We are a service provider, not a party to your transaction. We do not issue your invoices, we do not set their contents, and we take no position on the commercial substance of anything you file.

2. What the Service does not do

• We are not your tax advisor. Nothing in the Service or in our support is tax, legal or accounting advice. Whether a document is correct, due, or owed at all is your judgement and your advisors'.
• Compliance remains yours. The obligation to issue and file fiscal documents under the Electronic Fiscal Document Requirement rests on the taxpayer. We provide the means to meet it and the evidence of what happened; we do not assume the obligation.
• We do not check your figures. We validate a document against the rules BTS publishes — schema, mandatory parties, tax categories, operation mode, rounding — and refuse documents that would be rejected where we can tell in advance. We do not verify that a price, quantity, customer or tax treatment is the right one.
• We do not control BTS. Authorization, rejection, the rules applied, the availability of the registry and any penalty for late filing are BTS's, not ours.

3. Eligibility and registration

• You must be a taxpayer registered with BTS, or be authorised to act for one, and the taxpayer identification number (TIN) you give us must be the one on the certificate you upload. We check this at upload and refuse a mismatch.
• One TIN is one account. A TIN already registered here cannot be registered again — two accounts on one TIN would issue the same document numbers twice and BTS would refuse the second.
• Your account is not usable until you click the verification link we email you. Your API key is issued at that moment and shown to you once, on that page.
• New accounts are enabled for the BTS test environment. Test submissions have no fiscal effect and are never charged. Production access is granted by us on request, once you are ready to file for real.

4. Your taxpayer certificate

The signing certificate is issued to you by BTS — we neither issue it nor obtain it for you. You upload it to us so we can sign documents on your behalf, and by doing so you authorise us to use it for that purpose and no other.

• Your certificate and its password are encrypted at the application layer, under keys held separately from the data, before they are written to storage. A copy of the database alone does not yield a usable certificate.
• The certificate is used only to sign and transmit your own documents. It is never used for another taxpayer and never disclosed to one.
• Renewal is yours. Certificates expire. We warn in our logs from 60 days before expiry, and we refuse to sign with an expired certificate rather than let BTS reject the document and consume a document number — but obtaining the replacement from BTS, and uploading it in time, is your responsibility. Documents you cannot file because your certificate lapsed are not our liability.
• You must tell us promptly if your certificate is revoked, replaced or compromised.

5. Your credentials, and what is done with them

• Your API key identifies you to us. We store only a salted and peppered hash of it and compare in constant time, so we cannot show it to you again — if it is lost, rotate it. Rotation is self-service and takes effect immediately, invalidating the previous key.
• Portal passwords must be at least 12 characters and are checked against common-password lists. Portal sign-in requires a one-time code sent to your verified email address in addition to the password. Accounts lock after eight consecutive failed attempts, for fifteen minutes, doubling on repetition.
• You are responsible for what is done with your credentials. A request authenticated with your API key is treated as yours. A leaked key would let someone file documents in your name, which is why rotation is self-service and every submission is recorded in a ledger you can inspect. Tell us at support@techforge.bz if you suspect exposure.
• You may not attempt to reach another taxpayer's data, probe or load-test the Service without our written agreement, or use it to file documents for a taxpayer you are not authorised to act for.

6. Filing, duplicates and corrections

• Certain fields are ours to set and are overwritten if you send them: the supplier party, the document number, the series, the environment, the operation mode, the issue timestamp and the contingency fields. This is what keeps your sequence intact and your documents attributable to you.
• Retries must be keyed. Send an Idempotency-Key with any submission you might repeat. A retry carrying the same key replays the original result; a retry without one is a new document. Keys are unique to your account across all endpoints, are never compared against the request body, and do not expire.
• We refuse a document that repeats an existing one on your own customer reference, and we refuse a byte-identical re-extraction of the same source document, so a reprint does not become a second filing. Nothing reaches BTS and no document number is consumed when we do.
• An authorized document is cancelled by filing a cancellation event against it, not by deleting it. We never blindly resend a document that may already have reached BTS: we ask BTS what it holds first, because a duplicate fiscal document has to be formally cancelled to unwind.

7. Availability, outages and contingency

• There is no uptime guarantee. We operate the Service with continuous health checks, automatic replacement of failing instances and 24-hour infrastructure monitoring, but we do not commit to a service level and we do not offer credits for downtime.
• When BTS or the link to it is unreachable, the specification's contingency mode applies and we implement it: your document is still assembled, signed and recorded, and you receive an identifier and QR code you can print and give to your customer. The submission is queued and retransmitted automatically once BTS returns.
• Every submission carries a status you can query, so you can show which documents are filed, which are queued, and which were rejected and why. Whether BTS penalises a taxpayer for a delay caused by a government outage is a question for BTS; what we give you is a timestamped record of when the document was issued, when transmission was attempted, and what came back.
• We may take the Service down for maintenance, and will give notice where the work is planned.

8. Fees

• Production documents only. A fee is charged when a document is authorized by BTS in the production environment. Test submissions are always free. Documents that are rejected, queued or failed are not charged.
• Events are free. Cancellations, buyer-side events and reversals carry no charge. Cancelling a document does not refund the fee already charged on the document it cancels.
• Fees are set by the published price list in force when the document is authorized: a flat charge per document determined by the band its value falls into, with an additional charge where the document was produced by our automated extraction from a print job or PDF. The current list is on the Billing page of the portal and on our website. We may change it on 30 days' notice; the change applies to documents authorized after it takes effect, never retroactively.
• Charges are billed monthly in arrears in Belize dollars. Invoices are due 30 days from issue. We may suspend production filing on an account that is materially overdue, after notice; test filing and access to your records are not suspended for non-payment.
• Your portal shows the fee attached to each document and the month's total, and the calculation behind it. Query anything that looks wrong within 60 days of the invoice.

9. Your data

9.1 What we process, and why

To build a compliant fiscal document we must process the whole document: your customer's name, address and TIN, every line item, quantities, prices and tax. That is unavoidable — it is the document. We process it only to produce, sign, transmit and account for your fiscal documents, and to provide support and billing. We do not sell your data, we do not aggregate it across customers, and we disclose it to no one but BTS.

Technically, our systems can read your document contents; any provider telling you otherwise is describing a different architecture or describing it inaccurately. What constrains it is that every record is bound to your account in the data layer itself, that reaching customer data requires infrastructure credentials rather than an application login, that no support tool renders your invoices to our people, and that those credentials are held by two of TechForge's four directors and by nobody else.

BTS sees the line items. The BTS document format carries a line for every item with its description, quantity, unit price and tax. That is defined by the BTS technical specification, not by us, and no middleware can submit a compliant document without it. If that visibility matters to your business, the question belongs to BTS and to your own advisors. If you prefer, you can set a single generic description to replace your item names and codes before the document is built — quantities, prices, the line count and the totals are still sent.

9.2 Where it is held

Our infrastructure runs in Amazon Web Services' Northern Virginia region, in the United States: your records, encrypted certificates and backups are stored there. There is no AWS region in Belize. AWS hosts the encrypted data and has no application access to it. Service providers we contract to operate the Service are bound to confidentiality and may process your data only to deliver it. Where your own policy requires the data to stay in Belize, we can deploy the same middleware on hardware you own, on separate terms agreed with you.

9.3 How long we keep it

Two different things are kept for two different periods, and you control one of them.

• The record — each document's identifier, the BTS authorization number, the document number and series, the totals, the status and the dates — we keep for six years from the transaction, the period set by section 20(8) of the Tax Administration and Procedure Act (Chapter 51), or longer where the assessment window for the relevant period runs longer. This is never deleted by the setting below.
• The contents — the request your system sent, the XML we built and signed, and the response BTS returned — are the only place your customers' item lines, prices and details are held on our side. You choose how long we keep them: indefinitely, a fixed number of days, or not at all (erased in the same operation that records the outcome). You are asked at registration and can change it yourself at any time under Privacy in the portal. A change applies to documents already filed, not just future ones. Rejected and failed submissions are kept for diagnosis for at most 90 days, and never longer than the period you set.
• Short-lived security records — login codes, password-reset tokens, verification links — are deleted after seven days; service logs are retained for thirty.

Erasure is permanent and we hold the only copy. BTS will confirm an authorized document to its parties on request but does not return an archive, and we cannot reconstruct one. Erasure removes the contents from the live system immediately; automated database backups are kept for seven days, so a copy persists there until those roll off. Your own printed or PDF copy of each document is the record you are required to keep — section 20(8) binds the taxpayer, not us. If you stop being a customer, the record is kept until the statutory period expires and the contents follow whatever setting your account was last on.

9.4 Data protection

We handle personal data — customer names, addresses and taxpayer identification numbers — and treat Belize's Data Protection Act 2021 as the governing standard. We collect only what the BTS document format requires. You are responsible for having the basis to give us the personal data you send, and for your own notices to your customers. Where you ask us to act on personal data, we act on your instructions and the instructions of the law.

10. Security

Nothing assures anyone of invulnerability, and a provider who claims otherwise is not being straight with you. What we can state is the set of controls in place:

• TLS 1.2 or higher at the edge, plain HTTP redirected and never served, a web application firewall in front of the Service, and a mutually authenticated connection to BTS.
• Database encrypted with a customer-managed key in AWS Key Management Service; signing certificates and passwords separately encrypted at the application layer before they are written.
• The application reachable only through the delivery and firewall layer; the database accepting connections only from the application.
• Per-taxpayer API keys stored only as salted and peppered hashes; one-time email codes on portal sign-in; account lockout and service-wide rate limiting on login and administrative endpoints.
• Administrative actions — creating an account, rotating a key, replacing a certificate, reversing a document, changing a retention setting — written to an audit log with the actor, their address and the time.
• Automated database backups retained for seven days, encrypted with the same key, with deletion protection on the instance.

What is not in place, stated plainly: we have not commissioned an independent penetration test and we hold no third-party security certification. The controls above were built to the expectations of the SOC 2 security criteria and the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard; we are evaluating SOC 2 Type I and ISO/IEC 27001 and will pursue one. We would rather report a certification once we hold it than advertise a date for it.

Incidents. If you believe you have found a vulnerability, or suspect your API key has been exposed, write to support@techforge.bz; we acknowledge within four hours, at any hour, and we will not pursue anyone who reports a genuine issue in good faith. In the event of a breach affecting your data we will notify you within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, and tell you what happened, what was affected and what we are doing about it. We would rather send an early notice that is later revised than a tidy one that arrives too late to be useful.

11. Support

• We support everything between your system and BTS. Each submission records the exact BTS response code and message, so a failure comes with a specific reason.
• Infrastructure support and monitoring run 24 hours a day, every day. Customer support — integration questions, rejected documents, account changes — runs Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 17:00.
• Reach us at support@techforge.bz. We aim to respond within four hours: at any hour for an infrastructure incident, within business hours for everything else. These are targets, not guarantees.

12. Warranties and liability

The Service is provided as it stands, with the protections described in this agreement, and without guarantees. To the extent the law allows, we exclude all implied warranties, including fitness for a particular purpose and uninterrupted or error-free operation.

What we commit to is operating the controls described here, telling you promptly and specifically when something goes wrong, and keeping the records that let you show a tax authority exactly what happened and when. What we do not do is underwrite the commercial consequences of an outage, a rejected document or a security incident — whether the cause is ours, the Belize Tax Service's, or the link between us. In particular we are not liable for tax, penalties, interest or assessments levied on you, for lost profits, lost sales, lost or corrupted data, or for indirect or consequential loss of any kind.

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total liability to you for all claims arising in any 12-month period is limited to the fees you paid us for the Service in that period. Nothing in this agreement limits liability for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited under the law of Belize.

You will indemnify us against claims brought by third parties — including your customers — arising from the contents of documents you filed through the Service, or from your use of it in breach of this agreement.

13. Suspension and termination

• You may stop using the Service at any time and ask us to close your account. Fees already incurred remain payable.
• We may suspend or close an account for material breach of this agreement, for use that threatens the Service or another taxpayer, for a materially overdue invoice after notice, or where the law requires it. Except where the breach makes it unsafe to wait, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.
• We may discontinue the Service on 90 days' notice, during which you can export your submission history.
• On closure we stop accepting submissions. Your record is kept for the statutory period in section 9.3; your document contents follow whatever retention setting your account was last on. Export what you need before you close the account.

14. Changes

We may change this agreement. A change that alters the bargain — fees, liability, retention, termination — is published as a new version with a new effective date, and we will email the address on your account at least 30 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after that date is acceptance; if you do not accept, tell us and close your account before it. We may change the Service itself as BTS requirements evolve — that is the nature of compliance software, and keeping pace with BTS is what you are paying for.

15. General

• Governing law. This agreement is governed by the law of Belize, and the courts of Belize have exclusive jurisdiction.
• Entire agreement. This agreement, with the published price list, is the whole of what is agreed between us about the Service, and replaces any earlier understanding. A separate signed contract with TechForge prevails over it where the two conflict.
• Severability. If any part is unenforceable, the rest stands.
• Assignment. You may not assign this agreement without our written consent. We may assign it to a successor to our business on notice to you.
• Notices. We write to the email address on your account; keep it current. Write to us at support@techforge.bz, or TechForge Limited, 6 Cerro Lindo, Bullet Tree Road, Cayo, Belize, +501 615-4388.

version 1.0, 15 September 2026. Questions about anything above, before you register, to support@techforge.bz.

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