Nationwide spot checks by Greek tax inspectors have found that almost every other business is cheating the taxman in some way, as the debt-hobbled country’s authorities struggle to improve revenue collection amid a crippling recession.
Despite repeated campaigns by successive governments to clamp down on tax fraud, it remains a major problem in Greece, which for the past three years has relied on vast international rescue loans to stave off bankruptcy.
Finance Ministry data released on Friday showed that 731 of 1,465 companies — mostly restaurants, bars, coffee shops and clubs —checked from July 25 to Aug. 5 had violated tax laws. The highest rate of non-compliance, about 85 percent of those checked, was on the islands of Evia and Skyros.
Photo: EPA
The top tourist destinations of Mykonos, Santorini and Crete had rates of over 56 percent of the businesses investigated.
Authorities have recently ordered 12 businesses to close for a month for outstanding tax violations or resisting inspectors, and are planning to shut down another 14 for similar reasons — including a restaurant on Crete where customers allegedly chased away a team of inspectors this week. Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras said the government was forced to pass special legislation to enable tax checks on weekends and during the holiday month of August.
“We are engaged in an unprecedented campaign, closing down businesses and legislating,” he said in an interview with Mega TV, a private channel. “You can’t win the fight against tax evasion without carrying out checks.”
Stournaras said that, in some areas, entrepreneurs had not been issuing any receipts at all, concealing revenues and pocketing the sales tax levied on transactions.
Taxpayers are encouraged to seek receipts for goods and services purchased — effectively doing the taxman’s job — on pain of paying additional income tax.
Over the past three years, Greeks have been clobbered with successive tax hikes under a deeply resented austerity program demanded by the IMF and European countries in exchange for the country’s rescue loans.
Combined with pension and salary cuts, the measures worsened an economic contraction often compared with the Great Depression of the 1930s, with unemployment hitting a record 27.6 percent in May.
Among youths, a staggering 65 percent is without a job, although the conservative-led government has suggested that some businesses have been firing staff and rehiring them under the table, to avoid social security contributions.
So far, the public sector, which is broadly seen as largely inefficient and overstaffed, has avoided job losses — civil servants have for about a century enjoyed guaranteed jobs for life.
However, the government has promised creditors it will lay off 15,000 civil servants by the end of next year and suspend another 25,000 for up to eight months before subjecting them to involuntary transfers.
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said the DRAM supply crunch could extend through 2028, as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has led the world’s major memory makers to dramatically reduce production of standard DRAM and allocate a significant portion of their capacity for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. The most severe supply constraints would stretch to the first half of next year due to “very limited” increases in new DRAM capacity worldwide, Nanya Technology president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a news briefing. The company plans to increase monthly 12-inch wafer capacity to 20,000 in the first half of 2028 after a
Property transactions in the nation’s six special municipalities plunged last month, as a lengthy Lunar New Year holiday combined with ongoing credit tightening dampened housing market activity, data compiled by local land administration offices released on Monday showed. The six cities recorded a total of 10,480 property transfers last month, down 42.5 percent from January and marking the second-lowest monthly level on record, the data showed. “The sharp drop largely reflected seasonal factors and tighter credit conditions,” Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) deputy research manager Chen Chin-ping (陳金萍) said. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday fell in February this year, reducing
Taiwan has enough crude oil reserves for more than 100 days and sufficient natural gas reserves for more than 11 days, both above the regulatory safety requirement, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday, adding that the government would prioritize domestic price stability as conflicts in the Middle East continue. Overall, energy supply for this month is secure, and the government is continuing efforts to ensure sufficient supply for next month, Kung told reporters after meeting with representatives from business groups at the ministry in Taipei. The ministry has been holding daily cross-ministry meetings at the Executive Yuan to ensure
New vehicle sales in Taiwan plunged about 37 percent sequentially last month as the long Lunar New Year holiday and 228 Peace Memorial Day holiday cut short the number of working days, along with the lingering uncertainty over import tax cuts on US vehicles, market researcher U-Car said in a report yesterday. New car sales last month totaled 22,043, slumping from 35,073 units in January and down 19.89 percent from 37,515 in February last year, U-Car data showed. Sales of imported luxury cars, led by Mercedes-Benz, plummeted about 45 percent to 3,109 units last month from 5,663 units in the previous month,
RSS