Greece has collected only $19 million of $13 billion owed by the country’s biggest tax debtors, a rate of only 0.0014 percent, Deputy Finance Minister Giorgos Mavraganis has admitted, although he said it’s because many companies have gone out of businesses and people are using fake invoices to throw inspectors off the track.
Although a special team was appointed to chase the arrears owed by the 1,500 biggest debtors, it failed to bring in money, Mavraganis said, according to the newspaper Kathimerini. “It it is a fact that the results of the operational revenue unit for the period between May 1 and August 31 of 2012 on 459 cases with a large collective arrears resulted in a very small proportion being collected,” he said.
He was speaking in Parliament in response to a question submitted by the independent MP Odysseas Voudouris who wanted to know why the government has collected only $19 million out of $13 billion that the biggest tax cheats owed, although the overall bill is said to be as much as $70 billion cumulatively for all evaders.
Mavraganis said it was because that 170 of the 459 companies checked were bankrupt, that many of the cases involved the use of bogus invoices, that in many other cases no assets could be linked to those responsible.
Greece’s international lenders, the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) have been pressing the government to go after tax cheats although acknowledging as much as 80 percent of tax debt may never be collected. It takes up to a decade to prosecute tax evasion cases in Greece and there hasn’t been a single major prosecution of a large-scale cheat.
Unable to collect tax debts, the government instead has gone ahead with Troika-ordered pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions on workers, pensioners, the poor and people who do pay taxes. It had to scrap a notion to give tax cheats an 80 percent discount after objections from its lenders, however.
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